Tate Britain

All human life is pictured in glorious monochrome

Guides
There are two must-see photographic exhibitions on in London now – unconnected apart from their use of black and white.

The Don McCullin retrospective at Tate Britain is on until May 6. It starts with his early works in London, including the fantastic The Guv’nors, an image of local sharp-dressed lads posing in the framework of a building. It was that photo which got him seen by the Observer and he has been in demand since.

The exhibition guide features a timeline of world events and conflicts which had an impact on McCullin’s life and career. He apparently is haunted by the fact he is known as a war photographer, but there are many images of conflict and suffering here. Each section on a new conflict he has photographed has a useful introduction explaining it and putting it in context.

There are many shocking images of injury and death, and captions explaining what McCullin was doing at the time of some of the photos, including a photo of a man who was injured in an explosion which he was also struck by, but the man later died. There are haunting close up faces of shock and fear around the world from Biafra, Cyprus, Congo, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Beirut, Iraq and more. Quotes from McCullin reveal how hard he found it to be a witness to their horrors, but saw his role to capture and record it.

McCullin also happened to be in Berlin when the wall was going up, and photographs its building, and civilians and soldiers on both sides. People wave across to family and friends they will be separated from for decades.

On visits home, McCullin captured Bradford and the North as the section is called. There are images of people living in poverty, and also homeless people in the East End of London, showing suffering isn’t always a long way from home.

The exhibition ends with landscapes, still in black and white, but bringing peace to the photographer and hopefully the visitor.

At the Hayward Gallery and also on until May 6, is an exhibition of photos by Diane Arbus, taken in New York City where she was born in 1923, and killed herself in 1971.

These photographs are smaller and the gallery emphasises there is no set route around the exhibition, or chronology to it. The images are displayed on pillars that visitors drift around and have to get close to, and there are photo titles but no more information. Arbus was clearly attracted as a subject to many of those on the fringes of normal society, as well as the woman wrapped up in a fur coat on the bus.

The people photographed are all in New York, or Coney Island, where the idea of a fun resort is tested to the limit. There are many photos of female impersonators before or after their shows. There is a little boy with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, and spooky looking identical twins. Eddie Camel, Jewish Giant, taken at Home with his Parents in the Bronx in 1970, stoops to fit in the room with his normal-sized mum and dad. Another man is covered with tattoos, and a dwarf woman cleans her house.

It’s a completely different exhibition to the McCullin one, but one which also shows us a lot about the variations of humanity.

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Nash and Rauschenberg exhibitions fascinating contrast for day out

A trip to London meant a chance to catch up on two exhibitions which began last year and are worth seeing before they end in the next couple of months. Coincidentally the ones that caught my eye are at both the Tates.

At Tate Britain, there’s a large Paul Nash exhibition. Nash, who lived from 1889-1946, was involved in various artistic groupings in the 1930s and a leading figure in British surrealism, though his war paintings were what I knew him for, and after seeing the exhibition still seem to be his most powerful works.

Early works such as The Pyramid in the Sea and Night Landscape saw him influenced by the symbolists and exploring dream-like, often moonlit landscapes.

His First World War paintings and his own experiences made his works bigger, bolder and more dramatically coloured. We Are Making A New World from 1918 has a brave sun peeking over blood-red mountains, a churned up foreground and trees with only the trunks remaining. Ypres Salient at Night is a geometric painting, with light flooding from a sky alight with explosions. The Menin Road has a landscape of destroyed trees, toxic pools of water, a few struggling figures, smoke and light flooding through the devastated sky in straight lines. Spring in the Trenches, Wood Hill 1917 depicts new growth and sun shining over soldiers stuck in a trench. In these paintings dramatic colours not true to life and angular shapes are stunning and spectacular.

After the war, Nash became obsessed with certain places, such as Dymchurch, where he painted The Shore as long straight concrete lines, huge patches of yellow sand and a floaty sky. Other works included still lifes, such as Dead Spring, a plant’s dying greenery soft and twirling against harsh straight lines in the background.

Later works included compositions of objects such as driftwood and stones, and then landscape paintings including objects such as the Avebury stones, or objects representing them.

The Second World War brought along starkness to his work again, including Totes Meer (Dead Sea), inspired by the piles of metal from crashed planes he saw at the Cowley Dump in Oxford, making it into a new shiny sea full of waves.

His final paintings were a return to landscapes involving the moon or sun, and flowers in the sky as precursors of death. It’s a fascinating exhibition and if like me you knew Nash mainly for his war paintings its eye opening.

At Tate Modern, the Robert Rauschenberg exhibition couldn’t be more of a contrast. The artist lived from 1925-2008, and began his career in the 1950s. He came from Texas and only went to an art gallery for the first time after being drafted into the navy.

His first works included a car tyre coated in paint driven over a long strip of paper. Works developed into paintings incorporating found items, and then larger free-standing collages and some works he created live on stage.

There is also the infamous stuffed goad he acquired, and was initially unsure how to evolve it into an art work; eventually it became wrapped in a tyre and stood over a painting. Another work shows a single bed, sheet pulled enticingly back, but the whole coated in paint.

He also worked across art forms, creating sets for more than a decade for the Merce Cunningham dance group, who performed to compositions by John Cage.

Later works included silkscreens consisting of photos enlarged on to canvas, including the recently assassinated President Kennedy, and images from space, science and sport. Another departure was to create Mud Muse, a large tank of clay and water which pops and bubbles as air is released.

Later works took on a political hue, involving influences from countries with repressive governments, and also sculptures made from discarded scarp metal from his home state of Texas, then suffering after an oil crisis.

It’s a hugely varied exhibition and again a learning experience for someone only familiar with a few aspects of his work.

* Nash at Tate Britain continues until March 5, and Rauschenberg at Tate Modern until April 2.

From the ruins of ancient Rome to Coventry’s conceptual artists in one packed day in London

A day trip to London for a gig always means an early start and a late night for me, and the chance to fit in a few exhibitions.

I got around five this time, and they were certainly varied.

First stop, the British Museum for Francis Towne’s watercolours of Rome. Towne, who lived 1739-1816, visited Rome in 1780-81 and made a large selection of paintings of its famous landmarks and the surrounding countryside. He continued to work on them for many years afterwards, and some have clearly added extra pieces of paper on the side or bottom, with the scene continuing, or extra trees added later.

In the British Museum’s lovely cool print room with its muted lights the watercolours are lovely, delicate and somehow relaxing. However they were not really appreciated in Towne’s lifetime, though they were first displayed together in 1805; this is the second time. Towne tried several times to be admitted to the Royal Academy, but was always rejected; he was from Exeter and hated being seen as a provincial drawing teacher. Small comfort that we can now go and enjoy them and he is appreciated as a skilled watercolourist. The exhibition is on until August 14.

In the gallery leading off the print room, is Krishna in the Garden of Assam, until August 15. Subtitled the cultural context of an Indian textile, the main piece is the largest surviving example of an Assamese devotional textile, the Vrindavani Vastra.

The nine metre long cloth, made in 12 segments, is covered in detailed scenes from the life of the Hindu god Krishna. It was made in the late seventeenth century, but oddly found its way to the British Museum via The Times journalist Perceval Landon when he was covering the Younghusband exhibition to Tibet in 1903-4; it would be interesting to know both how it got there, and how he acquired it to bring it back.

A trip by Tube down to Tate Britain, and it’s almost from the sublime to the ridiculous. Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-1979 is less a visual feast and more a lot of reading. However you can become part of the art; in the first room, Roelf Law’s Soul City, a pyramid of oranges, gives you a chance to change the art by taking an orange.

An excellent small leaflet given out at the exhibition explains conceptual art simply and in a way that makes sense. Longer descriptions in the galleries left me more baffled. Some conceptual artists I get. Hamish Fulton and Richard Long’s documenting of their walks with photographs and descriptions seems to make sense. Gilbert and George’s performances as The Singing Sculptures appeal and make me wish I had seen them back in 1970.

There’s quite a lot of space devoted to Art & Language, the Coventry College of Art-based group who were so important to conceptual art, but also controversial, not least in the Lanchester Polytechnic they were based in. As one piece of information tells us: “Theorising here was not subsidiary to art or an art object but the primary concern of this art.” The show includes Hot –Warm-Cool-Cold, which was on exhibition at the Herbert in 1968, and consists of 43 pieces of paper on the wall, apparently on the theme of weather.

It’s a large exhibition with lots of info and a variety of work to serve as a good introduction, or to expand your knowledge. It’s on until August 29.

Also at Tate Britain, I popped into a BP Spotlight exhibition, Art and Alcohol, which is on until the autumn. It juxtaposes vastly different works and their different views on alcohol. There’s Gilbert and George again, with Balls: the evening before the night after – drinking sculpture 1972, 114 posed photos of the Balls bar on a night out.

Richard Billingham’s photo of his parents from 1994 shows his unwell-looking father being berated by his mother, and was groundbreaking at the time. There’s a Hogarth etching from 175 of Gin Lane, showing a drunken woman dropping her baby and other delights including violence, madness and a hanged person, showing the horrors said to come from gin drinking.

Other works are also morality tales. George Cruickshank’s enormous The Worship of Bacchus from 1860-62 depicts people celebrating life events with drink in the foreground, and then fighting and being destroyed by it behind.

It’s an interesting exhibition showing the move from trying to make a moral point to just depicting the facts over the years.

Back at the National Portrait Gallery until June 26 is Russia and the Arts, the age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, which is described as a once in a lifetime opportunity to see masterpieces from the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. It focuses on the cultural heroes of the period 1967-1914, and the artists who painted them.

There are figures you may expect to see – Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev and the two named in the title, plus others I hadn’t heard of. The composer Modest Mussorgsky appears dishevelled and in a dressing gown, but this was painted a few days before his death in hospital at a young age from alcoholism.

Towards the end as time move on in Russia, contemporary life intervenes. The poet Nikolai Gumilev is depicted as he was known at the time, as a dandy, but he was executed two years later in 1921 for counter revolutionary activities.

It’s a sobering end to an exhibition which was smaller than I expected, but still had lots to offer, with a lot of information about both sitter and artist and often the relationship between them, in some cases the friendliness or contempt visible in the work.

Winter wonder exhibitions on show at London galleries

If you’re heading down to London any time soon there are a few exhibitions that are worth seeing and are varied enough for there to be something to suit anyone’s tastes.
I wasn’t excited at the thought of Bronze at the Royal Academy but it turned out to be a real winner. Featuring items made out of bronze dating back BC until the present day it delights with its scope, its variety of subject matter, its world-wide range of exhibits and the many uses they were put to.
From the decorative to the useful, the ceremonial, the religious and sculptural representations, they’re all here. My favourites include Buddhas, such as a late sixth century Buddha Shakyamuni ubn Abhaya-Mudra from India, to much more recent works by Brancusi and Giacometti.

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