Picasso at the Art Gallery of NSW

Tax collectors are universally disliked, but we have them to thank for the magnificent exhibition of works by Picasso that is on display at the Art Gallery of NSW until 25th March.



Picasso often proclaimed: "I am the greatest Picasso collector in the world." And so he was. He hated to part with his work. At the time of his death in 1973, there were 70,000 of this prolific artist's works preserved in his various studios and warehouses. In lieu of inheritance tax, his heirs gave the French State first refusal of thousands of artworks in all mediums, plus photographs, documents and personal correspondence. When his widow died in 1986, the taxman scored another two thousand Picassos in lieu of death duties. (Not to mention 900 masterworks by his fellow-artists, from his personal collection.) The Musée Picasso in Paris was set up to house this collection, which constitutes a pictorial "diary", a chronology of the development of his style.


A selection from the Musée Picasso is on loan to the NSW gallery while the museum is undergoing renovations. They represent every period in the artist's career and every medium that he used. They are chronologically arranged in ten rooms.  I'll just touch on a few of the highlights and urge you to go and see for yourself.

The first room contains some of Picasso's early drawings and examples from his so-called Blue and Rose Periods. The one that stood out for me was the portrait of the brothel-keeper Celestine, an old woman with a milky eye. She looks forlorn and isolated in her dark blue cloak. The painting is almost a monochrome in its tones of blue-grey, the only touch of colour a faint blush on one cheek.

The next room contains works from the three years 1906-1909, when Picasso was fascinated by tribal art. The African and Pacific influences are evident here. There are several sketches and studies for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the controversial masterpiece that he painted in 1907. The savage power of the completed work is already palpable in the angular features of the women in the sketches. You can see why Picasso called the painting "an exorcism".

I liked the bronze bust of his mistress Fernande Olivier: it is so much like the cubist portrait of her which we saw at the NGV as part of the European Masters exhibition a few years ago. It is one of my favourite pictures.


We move on to the period when Picasso worked in tandem with Georges Braque, developing the cubist style, which combines several possible views of a three-dimensional object in one image.

Picasso called Cézanne "my only master" and said that he had spent years studying his work. It shows! The influence of Cézanne is clearly discernible in these proto-cubist works, especially in some of the earlier still lifes and landscapes.


The limited colour palette, mostly browns and greys, focuses attention on the shapes, the interlacing lines and shaded planes. Here are also a number of his collages, a new kind of sculpture incorporating all kinds of materials into wall-mounted paintings, from newsprint to sheet iron.

Picasso returned to classicism in the early 20s, when he befriended Serge Diaghilev and designed sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes. He also married a Ballet Russes ballerina, Olga Koklova. In this room I was enchanted by his elegant portrait of Olga, and I was thrilled to see the original portrait, so well-known in reproduction, of his son Paul as Harlequin.

Picasso really looked at the works of other great artists, and he wasn't shy to reference them - I loved his Village Dance, so clearly a homage to Renoir!

In the fifth room there are a number of female nudes, including The Reader and Nude in a Garden, for both of which Marie-Thérèse Walter was the model. Picasso met her when she was barely seventeen, and I love his many paintings of her: they are instantly recognisable for their tender pastels and lyrical curves, in contrast to his portraits of his other mistress, the photographer Dora Maar. Dora, a confident professional woman, is always depicted in geometrical planes, spiky shapes and strong colours. (Think of the NGV's Weeping Woman, which is a portrayal of Dora's grief at the death of her father.)

Picasso tried to keep his affaire with Marie-Thérèse secret and did "disguised portraits" of her, one of which is also on display here. It purports to be a Still Life On A Pedestal Table, but there is the signature fall of her blonde hair, the defining youthful colours, and the sinuous curves of various body parts doubling as still life objects. When she became pregnant, the cat was out of the bag and divorce from Olga followed.

Dora Maar documented day by day the painting of "Guernica", Picasso's monumental work depicting the bombing of that town during the Spanish Civil War. This series of photographs is also on display.

During WW2, Picasso continued to live and paint in Paris, harassed to some extent by the Gestapo, who kept a watchful eye on him. During this period and into the early 1950s, his work contains many symbols of death and violence: skulls, bulls, soldiers.

His harrowing Massacre in Korea references Goya's The Third of May and also reminds me of Manet's Execution of the Emperor Maximilian.

Come to think of it, I suppose Manet must have had a good look at the Goya before he painted Maximilian, just as he had a good look at Titian's Venus of Urbino before he got out the Winsor and Newtons to paint Olympia.


Directors remake other directors' movies, authors use other writers' plots, painters reference each others' works. And so they should. It is so interesting to look at a film, a book or a painting and detect echoes or a different arrangement of earlier ones that you enjoyed. But that is another story.

After he married the potter Jacqueline Roque in the mid-fifties, Picasso's work took a more cheerful turn. They moved to the south of France, where he started to paint with Matisse, much like he did with Braque many years earlier. The Matisse influence is evident in the lambent light and vivid colours of his work during this period.

Next time you are in Sydney, have a look at Nude in a Rocking Chair, one of the treasures of the NSW Art Gallery's permanent collection. The clear bright colours and background palm tree clearly defines it as part of this Cannes oeuvre.

Picasso painted until the end of his life at age 92. Many of his late works were inspired by other great artists: the best known is probably his series of Las Meninas after Velasquez. In the last room, I was delighted by his Déjeuner Sur L'herbe after Manet.

I felt very privileged to have been able to see this collection - that magnificent old Spaniard was so prolific, in so many media, and his work packs such an emotional punch! He is truly the Mohammed Ali of the art world: he floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee. When the last trumpets sound and the saints go marching in through those pearly gates, Pablo Picasso will be leading the artists.

Monet's Garden and Fairweather's Island

Monet's Garden at Giverney

When I popped this DVD in and sat back with a cup of tea and an anticipatory smile, I expected to see lots of Monet's paintings, intercut with shots of the bits of garden that inspired them. Instead, I saw a very interesting and informative film about the garden itself, and as the camera roamed the familiar settings, I saw the paintings in my head rather than on the screen.

The film follows the life of the garden through a year, from the first spring flowers, through the riotous summer colours, to the winter season when the garden closes to the public and the eight gardeners do their essential mantenance.

There are fascinating interviews with artists, gardeners and members of the Monet family. I liked the Japanese landscape gardener who explained that the famous bridge is not really the right shape for a Japanese bridge, and in any case Japanese bridges are not green, but red for contrast!

The garden is in two parts: the flower garden and the water garden which was only built later. Monet was a passionate gardener and created the garden with great consideration and an artist's eye for colour and design.

The gardeners among our members will especially like this DVD.

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Fairweather Man
"Fairweather Man" is an intimate portrait of the life and work of Ian Fairweather, an eccentric, reclusive, driven artist. It runs for 52 minutes, bringing his story to life through letters, diaries, archival footage and interviews. I particularly liked the inclusion of so many of his paintings: we are able to see his talent unfold, the development of his oeuvre reflecting the influence of events in his life and places he lived.

Abandonment as a child and the horrors of active service in World War I gave him a good nudge toward a habit of reclusive introspection. He could not settle, and China became the first stop in a life of wandering. Chinese culture had an overriding and lifelong influence on his art.

At 60 years of age, Fairweather experienced an epiphany. He built himself a flimsy raft and set sail from Darwin on a foolhardy, death-defying trip across the Timor Sea. For 16 days he drifted in a semi-conscious and hallucinogenic state. It is said that before that journey he was an extremely talented artist, but afterwards he became an extraordinary one.

For the last 20 years of his life Fairweather lived a hermit-like existence in a grass hut on Bribie Island, off the coast of Queensland. It was there that he created his greatest work, despite the primitive and unhygienic conditions. When he died in 1974, Australia lost a great painter, but you can see some of his best work at the Ian Potter Gallery any time you like. Go and treat yourself, it's free!

Pinups and Prophesies

The pin-up is interesting as a portrait genre, peculiar to the Second World War.




This DVD traces the evolution of the Australian pin-up, through interviews with some of the girls who posed for the pictures and some of the servicemen for whom they were true morale-boosters.


The film also gives a fascinating insight into the different social values and mores of those more innocent times.


Man Magazine first hit the newsstands in 1936 - it was based on the American Esquire, and featured excellent fiction and articles, cartoons and artwork. Some of Australia’s best writers and artists contributed to it.


At two shillings, it was a bit more upmarket than its sixpenny cousin, Pix Magazine, established two years later. Pix, as its name implies, was heavily illustrated and it featured a mix of human-interest stories, fashion and politics. Both magazines became more risqué in later years, but at the beginning of the war they were very much family fare.


The magazines ran "Beach Girl" competitions to encourage the idea of healthy outdoor living, with readers invited to send in their photographs. The chosen bathing beauties had their pictures published, captioned with their names and addresses! See what I mean by "more innocent times"?


Many of the girls received letters from servicemen abroad, and penpal correspondence flourished. One of the former pinup girls tells how devastated she was when one whole platoon, whose mascot she was, was wiped out. She had never met any of the Diggers, but the letters she exchanged with them had forged close friendships: they confided in her and she felt protective of them.


As the war progressed, so the pinup evolved from pretty picture to propaganda material. The film uses archival footage, artwork and interviews to capture the spirit and mores of the time. I particularly liked the interviews with the men and women, now in their seventies and eighties, who were pinups and soldiers at the time, with flashback photos of how they looked then. No question, good bone structure tells! Those lovely girls are lovely old ladies now.


The film runs for 52 minutes and is narrated by Claudia Karvan.

This film was made when The Da Vinci Code was a best seller. Waldemar Januszczak gets on the bandwagon by seeking coded messages by Michelangelo in the frescoes of the Sustine chapel.


His tortuous theory drags in the ark of the covenant, the invention of the printing press and the prophet Zachariah among others. I don't know why he didn't throw in alien abductions, Elvis and the Loch Ness monster while he was about it. The burden of his message seems to be that Michelangelo prophesied the massacre of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians at Waco in 1993.


Anyway, ignore all that silly stuff and you are left with a very interesting history of the Sistine Chapel. The Della Rovere family produced two Popes: Sixtus IV, who built the chapel, and Julius II, who decorated it. This is their story.


The history of the papal battles and politics of the time is quite fascinating. It is not only our own building industry that has trouble coming in on time and on budget!


Mr Januszczak had access to the Sistine Chapel during cleaning and restoration operations, so we get right up close to the frescoes, on the scaffolding of the workers. It is interesting that the surface of the ceiling is not smooth, but rather rough undulations. He points out the obscene gesture that one of the little cherubs is making: a naughty joke by the painter - it is too small to be seen from any distance. It is also really thrilling to see Michaelangelo's mucky thumbprints on the edges.


Mr Januszczak knows his subject and when he is not airing his weird theories, he is very entertaining and informative.


He puts Michaelangelo's position among the other artists of the time in perspective, and we see some lovely works by other Renaissance painters and sculptors, notably the magnificent Raphael portrait of Julius II (above). Michaelangelo lived to 89. Thirty years elapsed between his painting the first and last parts of the Chapel.

The Germans Are Coming!

Hard on the heels of the Viennese exhibition, the NGV is about to give us another treat: an extensive collection of avant-garde art from Germany, spanning the first three decades of the 20th century. The exhibition is currently at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and will open here on 25th November.



Sparing no effort or expense, I selflessly travelled all the way to Sydney last weekend in order to go and preview the exhibition for our members. L.P. Hartley remarked that the past is a foreign country - they do things differently there. The same can be said of Sydney. For one thing, the taxi drivers are not afflicted wth B.O. and they know where they are going. I flagged down one of this fine body of men (and women, for all I know) outside my hotel, just like they do in the movies, and he took me straight to the Art Gallery with no prompting.

Felix Nussbaum's painting gave its name to the exhibition: "The Mad Square - Modernity in German Art 1910-37". These were tumultuous years, socially and politically. The eponymous "Mad Square" refers to Berlin's famous Pariser Platz, a place that embodies the crazy and fantastic zeitgeist of the times.


The Mad Square is not only a place but also evokes the edginess of the times - the atmosphere of the exhibition rooms made me think of of Joel Grey's sly, louche Master of Ceremonies in "Cabaret", Peter Lorre's sinister paedophile in "M" and Walter Sickert's "Ripper" paintings.

In the time span covered by the exhibition, Germany went through the horrors of WW1, followed by economic disaster, the political turmoil of the abdication of the Kaiser, the establishment of the decadent Weimar Republic and the gradual rise of Fascism. All this is embodied in the range of artistic experimentation and creative freedom that saw artists move away from figurative work towards inceasingly abstract forms.

To give an overview of the scope of the exhibition: the starting point of the show is the Expressionism that flourished until the beginning of the world war, moving on to Dada by 1916, which was overtaken by the golden age of Walter Gropius' Bauhaus school of art and design from 1919 until its end in 1933, when the Nazis raided the school and closed it down. The Bauhaus was essentially a school of design that sought to fuse the aesthetics of fine arts with the technical skills of crafts. The exhibition includes some beautiful examples of furniture, ceramics and textiles.


There is a very interesting collection of photographs and drawings representing the brief period of Constructivism in 1922 and '23, that saw art fused with technology - lots of photographs of machines.

The show moves on to the art of the 1920s - the sophisticated metropolis of Berlin providing a rich source of inspiration. Indeed, Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" is screened on a continuous loop and there are lovely contemporary film posters. Not only of "Metropolis" but also of "M" and of "The Cabinet of Dr Caligari". The latter, with its marvellous expressionist sets, is, for my money, the greatest movie of the silent era, and incidentally the one that hooked me on the beauty and magic of film beyond Hollywood and Disney. I first saw it at the impressionable age of eight, when my Auntie Ann who was babysitting me, took me with her to the local Film Society.

The decadent Berlin of this era is best described by Christopher Isherwood in his series of "Berlin Stories". Nothing was beyond the pale in the brothels, clubs and gambling dens; it would have been fertile soil for Krafft-Ebbing and his colleagues. From this section two pictures encapsulate the atmosphere of the city for me. In The Sex Murderer by Heinrich Davringhausen, I like the way he references Manet's Olympia and I am amused by the clichéd bogeyman lurking under the bed: he looks more terrified than his intended victim! Maybe he's new at the sex fiend trade.

I was also amused by The Powder Puff (George Grosz) - the wall text explains that the prostitute powdering her friend's bottom is helping her get ready for the next client. Clearly an upmarket establishment: each client gets clean sheets and a freshly powdered bottom!


By the mid-1920s, there was a move towards Objectivism, returning to more traditional modes of representation and away from modernity. In this area there is a fascinating range of photographic portraits of contemporary figures: Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and Paul Klee among them.

One of my favourite parts of the exhibition is the "Degenerate Art", singled out by the Nazis as representative of the moral decay and mental deficiency that had infiltrated modern art. There is a fine crop of works by moral degenerates and mental defectives such as Picasso, Max Beckmann, Franz Marc, Kandinsky, Paul Klee and others of their disgusting ilk. I also liked the posters advertising the exhibition of Degenerate Art that the Nazis had put on so that the German people could see for themselves the horror and feel the fear-and-loathing of it all. That backfired bigtime!

After a bit of lunch and a restorative cup of peppermint tea in the Members' Room (why doesn't the NGV's Members' Room do lunch?) I went to have a look at the permanent collection. I haven't been to the museum since the completion of the new contemporary galleries, so I thought I would suss them out. I saw some old favourites: for some reason I love the fat lady in the yellow dress by Matthew Smith - I was delighted to see her again, near another of my favourites: the still life by Giorgio Morandi.

There is some delightful Op Art and Pop Art that takes you right back to the Sixties, and I was fascinated by a wall-size abstract on a reflective surface, that caused me and the room behind me to become part of the picture. There was a dead clown lying on the floor at my feet, but I didn't let that spoil my day.

Three sculptures commanded my attention: Killing Time by Ricky Swallow, an exquisitely detailed carving of a table on which is displayed all the sea creatures that he can remember killing and eating in his life;

 The Comforter by Patricia Piccinini, a disturbing figure of what appears at first glance to be a teenage girl cuddling a baby, but on closer inspection you see that she is as hirsute as a Turkish navvy and the "baby" is her arms is a torso with a pair of baby feet at one end and a bunch of huge fingers at the other. Repellent yet mesmerising!

Spyrogyra by Tony Cragg is a ten foot tall spiral with bottles seeming to grow out of it. The black and white reproduction won't do it justice: the subtle shading of green, white and brown bottles with just the occasional blue evokes the embodiment of plant life: Christmas trees, pine forests, the waving tendrils of a spirogyra, last seen under a microscope in high school biology class!


As I was leaving, two rows of large photographs divided by fluorescent tubes caught my eye, and I recognised a portrait of Hannie Schaft, the sixteen year old Dutch girl who was shot by the Gestapo for helping the Resistance in Haarlem. I couldn't think what Hannie is doing in Sydney - she is not a well-known figure outside Holland. I only happen to know about her because I have spent time in Haarlem. So I wandered over to have a closer look.


The installation is called Seven people who died the day I was born – April 18 1945. It is by Peter Kennedy and he uses it to illustrate the way in which individual lives are connected to political and historical events. I found it interesting and thought-provoking.
If you find yourself in Sydney, do try and spend a couple of hours in the Art Gallery of NSW: they have a marvellous collection and you will get VIP treatment of you flash your NGV card!

Roses

At the Flower and Garden show (where the WAS exhibit outshone everyone else's!) I noticed how many artists chose roses to paint
Ask anyone to name a flower and the first one to come to mind will probably be the rose. Their scent, their colour and their beauty entrance us. Most modern perfumes contain a trace of rose in their fragrance composition. A red rose is the ultimate symbol of love: on St Valentine's Day it is impossible to get hold of a red rose unless you have placed an order days in advance.

Perhaps the most famous rose of all time is the Peace Rose, one of the most beloved roses in the world. A warm yellow and pink-tipped bloom with a delicate, sweet scent, it has been the top choice of rose-growers in all countries since it was created just after World War II. There is a very interesting book by Antonia Ridge about the creation of the Peace Rose: "For the love of a Rose".

Rose leaf imprints have been found in 35 million year-old fossils in the Colorado Rockies, and roses are mentioned in Asian documents from as early as 3000 BC. The Greeks adorned their altars with roses and offered them to the gods. The Romans, who would feel right at home in Las Vegas, in their turn went right over the top with roses as a luxury item: at banquets, the guests would be sprinkled with rose water and have rose oil rubbed on their bodies. The floor, walls and ceiling would be carpeted in roses and rose-scented wine would be served. Talk about tacky!

In Alexandria, Cleopatra - famous for her lack of restraint - ordered a carpet of roses 30cm thick for her first meeting with Antony. One can only hope that everybody wore stout boots and thornproof leggings for the occasion.

The remedial powers of the rose were much prized: in ancient China roses were deemed effective for dropsy and constipation, the Egyptians chewed rose petals for toothache and in 17th Century Europe powdered rose petals were used to stop bleeding and to cure headaches.


Recently it has been found that rose flowers contain Vitamins A, C, and P and taken in capsules can relieve stress, depression and insomnia. It is not even necessary to eat them: a dozen red roses can make you feel great just by appearing on your doorstep.

The Couch Potato Takes to the Streets

In the fascinating DVD "The National Gallery's Grand Tour", art historian Tim Marlow takes us on a walk round the streets of London's Soho, Covent Garden and Chinatown. In the streets and alleyways, in the most unexpected and unusual places, we discover 44 of the National Gallery's most famous works of art.



Complete with frames and wall texts, these superb full-size reproductions delight passers-by, who stop to look, to whip out their 'phones for a picture and sometimes to call the number on the wall text for the audio-info.

In this DVD, we take a fresh look at the paintings in their temporary new hanging spaces. It's interesting to see them in a completely new context and Mr Marlow is an engaging and very knowledgable guide. The West End has become a giant art gallery: Vincent's Sunflowers is on a sidewalk café wall, Caravaggio's Salomé hangs next to the door of a sex shop. Stubbs' Whistlejacket prances on the wide expanse of a warehouse wall. Seurat's Bathers at Asniéres are sunning themselves beside the staff entrance to Hamley's and Holbein's Ambassadors solemnly regard the passers-by in Berwick Street, Soho. I wonder what they make of it all!

Amazingly, only four of the pictures disappeared overnight during the twelve weeks of the exhibition, including Belshazzar's Feast by Rembrandt. The theft of that huge work was captured on the ubiquitous CCTV cameras and is reproduced frame by frame in the book "Tiger Seen on Shaftesbury Avenue".

This book is a kind of catalogue of this unusual exercise: it is a National Gallery publication that documents the exhibition and viewers' effusive reactions to it. It features images of the paintings taken by passers-by, including Rousseau's "Surprised "on Shaftesbury Avenue. The book quotes insightful and witty comments from various members of the public and recounts amusing anecdotes regarding people's reactions.

The National Gallery called this exhibition The Grand Tour. It celebrates the richness and diversity of the Gallery's permanent collection and its aim was to encourage people to visit the genuine works. In this it was successful, attracting not only tourists but many Londoners who had been unaware of the visual treasures that are available, free of charge, in their marvellous city.


Here in Marvellous Melbourne our very own NGV also has a wonderful collection of paintings and we are extremely lucky that the permanent collection is on view free of charge. Unlike many international art museums, where you have to hand over an arm and a leg before they let you clap eyes on so much as a small watercolour by a Sunday painter.


The NGV's annual blockbuster exhibitions of loaned masterpieces are great, but wouldn't it be a treat if our own masterpieces could go walkabout in our city? How exciting to come across Cleopatra in an alleyway or meet Dame Nellie Melba in Collins Street!


I borrowed the DVD from the Eastern Region Library system (Ringwood, Knox et al) and the book is available at the Whitehorse-Manningham Libraries.