Review of In the Land of the Gods. Marc Chagall and the Greek World at the Musée National Marc Chagall, Nice

10/01/20

In the Land of the Gods

Marc Chagall and the Greek World

Musée National Marc Chagall, Nice

16 November 2019 – 27 April 2020

In the early 1950s, Marc Chagall (born 1887, Belarus) accepted the suggestion of his Greek publisher friend Tériade (real name Stratis Eleftheriadis) to illustrate a new edition of the second-century AD pastoral prose romance Daphnis and Chloe, attributed to Longus, and set on the Greek island of Lesbos, where the young shepherd and shepherdess fall in love. To get a feel for the country and its history and mythology, Chagall made two trips there, in 1952 and 1954. He also visited a wider range of tourist destinations, including Athens and Olympia. The Jewish artist was bowled over by what he described as “the land of the gods” – a country where every monument transports the visitor back several thousand years, yet with affinities to the ambience of the French Riviera, where he had made his home in Saint-Paul de Vence. What followed were series of illustrations, not only for Daphnis and Chloe, but also Homer’s Odyssey and Sappho’s poetry, and paintings, gouaches, ceramics and large-scale mosaics (for the faculty of law in Nice), and set and costume designs for the Paris Opera. Hellenic culture became mixed in with Chagall’s Jewish motifs and Old Testament illustrations and remained a prominent influence on his work until his death in 1985.

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Edvard Munch: The Graphic Works

10/04/19

Edvard Munch: The Graphic Works

Edvard Munch: love and angst

British Museum

11 April – 21 July 

Although best known today for his paintings, it was through his graphic works that Edvard Munch made his international name. This exhibition at the British Museum, London – the largest of his prints in 45 years and compiled in collaboration with Norway’s Munch Museum – brings together some of his most iconic images, and reunites a number of prints with their matrices, elucidating the various processes involved in their making. Norwegian Arts looks at the artist’s experimental use of lithography, etching and woodcut.

Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s inscription at the foot of an 1896 black-and-white lithographic print of his iconic painting The Scream (1893) – ‘I felt the great scream throughout nature’ – is almost as soul-wrenching and shudder-inducing as the world-famous image itself. According to Giulia Bartrum, the curator of the British Museum’s forthcoming exhibition, ‘Edvard Munch: love and angst’ (11 April to 21 July), the wide-mouthed figure shown covering his or her ears, long assumed to be screaming, might, in fact, be hearing the scream rather than uttering it. The full title of the work, The Scream of Nature, similarly supports this standpoint. Either way, the very fact that such discussion is still ongoing, 126 years after the painting of the picture, shows the enduring appeal and intrigue of the Symbolist artist’s work. This lithograph will be one of more than 80 works on display, primarily comprising prints, from the period between 1894, when Munch first began experimenting with graphic media, and the first decade of the 20th century. During this time, Munch travelled a lot between Kristiania (modern-day Oslo), Paris and Berlin. It was in Berlin that he made his first print, aged 30. 

Read the full feature on the Norwegian Arts site

Review of Portrait of the Artist: Käthe Kollwitz at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

Portrait of the Artist: Käthe Kollwitz

Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

13 September – 26 November 2017

“I was determined to be an artist from the outset, even though I had the disadvantage of being a girl.”

Her gender was not Käthe Kollwitz’s only disadvantage, as a graphic artist (at a time when this was the least prized – and least well paid for – of the visual arts), living in the "bohemian" workers’ district of Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, and surviving two world wars. This aside, she enjoyed, from the outset, the support of her family, husband, and friends. Thanks to this, her determination, and, in no small measure, her talent, Kollwitz (1867-1945) met with great success. Today, she has four museums dedicated solely to her work and, in her native Germany, there are 40 schools that bear her name. In 1920, she became the first woman to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts, an honour that brought with it a full professorship, albeit that she rejected the title owing to her communist leaning for egalitarianism. Her work was shown in New York in 1922, she was the subject of many books and articles, and the first big monograph on her work was published as early as 1923. Despite her prints being widely reproduced in China and Russia, she is sadly little known in the UK, where only three of her drawings – and not all that many of her prints – are held in public collections. This enlightening and carefully selected exhibition has been put together in collaboration with the British Museum – comprising 36 works from its collection, plus four loans – by Frances Carey, the former deputy keeper of prints and drawings. Marking the 150th anniversary of Kollwitz’s birth, it will tour to the Young Gallery, Salisbury; the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea; the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; and end up "home" at the British Museum in 2019.

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