Review of Scandal and Beauty: Mark Gatiss on Aubrey Beardsley (BBC iPlayer)

10/06/20





Published in the summer 2020 issue of Art Quarterly

Review of Cai Guo-Qiang: Gunpowder Art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

23/03/20

Published in the spring 2020 issue of Art Quarterly

Review of Hedda Sterne at Victoria Miro Mayfair

02/03/20

Hedda Sterne

Victoria Miro Mayfair, London 

29 January – 21 March 2020

Hedda Sterne. “The only female at [the] birth of abstract expressionism.” Friends and neighbours with gallerist Peggy Guggenheim and in the stable of art dealer Betty Parsons. A “great-artist”. 

Born Hedwig Lindenberg on 4 August 1910, in Bucharest, Romania, Sterne lived to the grand age of 100, dying in New York City in 2011. She knew she wanted to be an artist from the age of five or six. “I always loved Leonardo,” she told Sarah Boxer, for the New York Review of Books, shortly before she died. “Artists were always referred to as great artists. I thought that’s what the profession was. One word: great-artist. There wasn’t one moment in my life when I thought I wanted to be anything else.” And so that is what she became. She began to make a name for herself in Romania, but it was after arriving in New York in 1941, fleeing Nazi-occupied Bucharest, that things really began to happen. Having married and separated from a man named Fritz Stern, she adopted his surname, adding an “e”, maintaining this moniker, despite her marriage to fellow Romanian artist Saul Steinberg, three years later. 

Sterne fell in love with America and painted its modernity from every angle: “The American kitchen, the American bathroom, the American street, you know, its horizontals and verticals, its points and lines. New York was a total delight, a paradise.” In 1950, she was photographed by Nina Leen, along with 14 other artist-signatories – including Willem De Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still – of an open letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, protesting against the museum’s aesthetically conservative group-exhibition juries. The photograph, of which Sterne later said, “I am known more for that darn photo than for 80 years of work,” describing herself as the “feather on top”, was subtitled “Irascible Group of Advanced Artists” and published on the cover of Time-Life magazine on 15 January 1951. Being the only female in the picture garnered Sterne much attention – positive and negative. Lumped together with the abstract expressionists, partly because of her gallerist and dealer, and largely because of this photograph, Sterne always maintained she was not one of the group. “I was not an abstract expressionist. Nor was I an Irascible,” she told Boxer, and, as critic Grace Glueck wrote in 2006: “She has maintained a stubborn independence from styles and trends, including surrealism and abstract expressionism … Although she never developed a signature style, Ms Sterne’s explorations have produced a small universe of evocative images.”

Read my full review here

Review of Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution at the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK)

14/02/20

Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution

Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK)

1 February – 30 April 2020

The Ghent Altarpiece (completed in 1432 and inaugurated in 1435) is as known for its eventful history – as the most frequently stolen work of art, with one panel’s whereabouts remaining unknown since 1934 – as it is for its splendour and precise craftmanship. More recently, it has also become a social media sensation, with the Mystic Lamb (the surprisingly tiny central “figure”, representing Christ as the Lamb of God) even being given its own Instagram account, as the ongoing process of restoration has revealed a completely different – and far more exquisite – painting underneath centuries’ of overpainting and oxidised varnish. 

Even after restoration, it still remains a mystery which Van Eyck sibling painted what. The work is thought to have been begun by Jan’s elder brother, Hubert, (c1360/70-1426) about whom little is known, and by whom no further works are thought to exist, and completed by Jan (c1390-1441) after Hubert’s death. There is some suggestion that their two other siblings may also have lent a hand, although only Hubert and Jan are credited in the Latin quatrain on the polyptych’s frame, which calls Hubert the greatest painter there was, and Jan “second in art”. The consensus, however, is that the majority of the work was undertaken by Jan. To celebrate the near completion of this restoration project – which has taken longer than planned due to its unexpected complexity – and the opening, in October, of a new visitors’ centre in St Bavo’s Cathedral, for where the altarpiece was commissioned, and to where it will return, the former capital of Flanders is celebrating a year’s worth of Van Eyck-themed festivities, exhibitions and events, under the (somewhat cringeworthy) header of #OMGVanEyckWasHere. At the heart of this is the exhibition, Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, at the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK), which, for the past eight years, has housed a studio for the restoration work, visible at all times to the public.

Read the full review here

Review of Josef Herman: Journey at Flowers Gallery, Kingsland Road, London

06/01/20

Josef Herman: Journey

Flowers Gallery, Kingsland Road, London
15 November 2019 – 25 January 2020

I don’t know what I will be
A poet or a painter
I don’t know whether I will speak
Through poems or paintings.

I like pictures in poetry
I like poetry in pictures
I don’t know what I will be
A poet or a painter.

Perhaps I will never be
A poet or a painter
And with unwritten poems
I will pass through life, a living picture.

(Josef Herman, age 12)

Born in Warsaw in 1911, Josef Herman, the subject of this two-floor retrospective, comprising works drawn from a career spanning half a century, was the son of an illiterate Jewish cobbler. He grew up in a predominantly Jewish working-class neighbourhood and had little formal education. Nevertheless, he was a voracious reader and well versed in what was going on in the wider art world. 

In 1938, Herman moved to Brussels to escape the onslaught of nazism. From there, he fled via France to Britain – first to Glasgow, then to London, then to Ystradgynlais in south Wales, then back to London, then to Suffolk, and ultimately to London again – where he remained until he died in 2000, age 89. Herman’s choice of the Belgian capital as his first port of call was significant, given the decision of so many other émigré artists to head to the artistic capital of Paris. As his son, David, writes in his contribution to a catalogue published by Ben Uri Gallery in 2014: “That generation of Jewish refugees, especially those from central and eastern Europe, divided into those who were by temperament insiders (for example, GR Elton and Isaiah Berlin) and those who were permanent outsiders. Herman was in every sense an outsider: he was from eastern Europe, passionately involved with Jewish culture and soaked in Yiddish writing, politically on the left. Above all, his artistic formation could hardly have been more remote from the central British traditions.”

Read the full review here

Review of Laura Knight: A Working Life at the Royal Academy of Arts, London

30/10/19

Laura Knight: A Working Life

Royal Academy of Arts, London

2 September 2019 – 2 February 2020

Despite popular belief, Laura Knight (1877-1970) was not, in 1927, the first woman to be elected to the Royal Academy of Arts, London (as an Associate Royal Academician) since the founder members, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser (selected, however, by the King, not elected by fellow members). Five years previously, Annie Swynnerton had received the same honour at the age of 78. Nevertheless, Knight’s election was something of a coup. It went on to take a further nine years for her to become a full member, and 30 more on top of that before she was invited to the institution’s annual dinner. Such were some of the myriad obstacles in the way of female artists at the time – but more on that to come!

Knight (at this stage still Laura Johnson) began submitting (always rather large) paintings to the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in 1895, but was not successful until 1903, the year that she and Harold Knight married. They had met at Nottingham School of Art, where she had enrolled at the age of just 13, having been encouraged by her mother to become an artist. A portrait he painted of her a year later, in 1891, is included in this one-room exhibition, showing her in profile. Knight recalled how it was during the sittings for this painting that she “first got a hint that I meant as much to him as him to me”. 

Luckily for her career, Knight was a self-acknowledged extrovert, who promoted her work wherever and however she could. She featured, for example, in a British Pathé newsreel, sketching and painting models in a mock studio, and she further published two autobiographies: Oil Paint and Grease Paint (in February 1936, the month she was elected to full membership of the RA, and which became an immediate bestseller) and The Magic of a Line (in 1965, the year of her retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy – the institution’s first one-woman show). Certainly, she exhibited widely, initially together with her husband Harold, and she also showed work at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour, the Women’s International Art Club, the Venice Biennale (1914 and 1924), and with the Society of Women Artists, of which she became president in 1932. As early as 1929, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in recognition of her services to art.

Read the full review here

Review of Helene Schjerfbeck at the Royal Academy of Arts, London

01/10/19

Helene Schjerfbeck

Royal Academy of Arts, London
20 July – 27 October 2019

It is the same old story over again: a female artist, with a vast number of works to her name, successful during her lifetime, but since largely forgotten to the world at large (albeit still a known name in her native Finland). Her male contemporaries, whose influence is visible in her work (but would this have been a reciprocal relationship?), remain, of course, well known even outside the core of the art world. As deserving as the many other “rediscovered” women being brought out of the closet and put back into the spotlight, Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) is currently having her turn with her first UK solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (organised together with the Ateneum Art Gallery/Finnish National Gallery). 

Born in Helsinki, Schjerfbeck was discovered young by the Finnish painter Adolf von Becker, who secured her a place at the Finnish Drawing School when she was just 11 years old. Five years later, she moved to Becker’s private academy, from where she travelled to Paris to study at the Académies Trélat and Colarossi. Living the life of an educated artist, she flitted between Paris, Pont-Aven, St Petersburg, Vienna, Florence and even St Ives, Cornwall, exhibiting successfully across Europe, particularly in the Nordic countries, but never especially so in the UK. A major exhibition planned for the United States in 1939 was cancelled due to the outbreak of the second world war. Schjerfbeck, who died when she was 83, represented Finland posthumously at the Venice Biennale a decade later, in 1956. 

Read the full review here

Review of Chihuly at Kew: Reflections on Nature at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London

08/05/19

Chihuly at Kew: Reflections on Nature

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London

13 April – 27 October 2019

If, as Seneca the Younger claimed, “all art is but imitation of nature”, putting one’s works in amongst one of the most beautiful natural gardens in London – the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew – might seem somewhat presumptuous, or asking for criticism at the least. Alternatively, of course, one could take the Matissian view, that “great art picks up where nature ends”, and thus see the intervention by American glass artist Dale Chihuly (b1941, Tacoma, Washington) as a challenge and, potentially, a bidirectional compliment. 

I chose to review this, his second exhibition in the gardens (the first being Gardens of Glass in 2005, so popular its run had to be extended), as a challenge to myself, being a vehement disliker of his large, florid, and certainly over-the-top chandelier at the V&A, London. I wanted to see if I could be converted to appreciate Chihuly’s work, significantly inspired by nature – both plant and sea life – when presented in such a setting. And, indeed, I 90 per cent was.

Read the full review here

Review of John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing at Two Temple Place, London

25/03/19

John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing

Two Temple Place, London

26 January – 22 April 2019

With the bicentenary of his birth on 8 February this year, there is, deservedly, a renewed interest in the Victorian polymath, John Ruskin: a writer, whose collected publications run to 38 volumes; an art critic; an artist; a teacher; a social commentator; a collector; and, importantly, a supporter of artists. His anniversary is being marked by a plethora of exhibitions around the country, including several at Brantwood (his final home in the Lake District); Ruskin, Turner & the Storm Cloud: Watercolours and Drawings, which is touring from York Art Gallery (29 March – 23 June) to Abbot Hall Art Gallery, in Kendal, on the edge of the Lakes (12 July – 5 October); and John Ruskin: Art & Wonder at the Millennium Gallery, Sheffield (29 May – 15 September). The latter is a further iteration of the exhibition, John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing, currently on display in the neo-gothic mansion, Two Temple Place, on the Embankment, London, which celebrates primarily Ruskin’s intentional legacy, the Guild of St George. 

Read the full review here

Review of Painter. Mentor. Magician. Otto Mueller and his Network in Wrocław at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin

15/01/19

Painter. Mentor. Magician. Otto Mueller and his Network in Wrocław

Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin

12 October 2018 – 3 March 2019 

and

Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu

8 April – 30 June 2019

Otto Mueller was born in 1874 in Silesia – then a part of Germany, now a part of Poland. From 1907 to 1919, he lived in Berlin, where, from 1910 until its dissolution in 1913, he was a member of the group of expressionist artists known as Die Brücke. In 1919, Mueller moved to Wrocław (then Breslau), where he taught at the State Academy of Fine Arts and Crafts – deemed to be “the liveliest in Germany” in the 1920s – for more than a decade, until his death in 1930. This exhibition, which shows first at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin before travelling to the Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu, is the outcome of a German-Polish research project, and explores the life and work of Mueller, considering him in the roles of painter, mentor and magician, but it simultaneously celebrates the lively exchange between the two cities up to the end of the second world war – and, indeed, beyond. This is done in part through the contextualising of Mueller’s work alongside that of his contemporaries – from the Bauhaus, der Sturm, and the myriad other movements and schools thriving in the early 1900s – but also by the inclusion of so-called “guest exhibits”, spotlighting works of Polish expressionism and neo-impressionism.

Read the full review here

Review of Klimt/Schiele: Drawings from the Albertina Museum, Vienna at the Royal Academy of Arts, London

08/01/19

Klimt/Schiele: Drawings from the Albertina Museum, Vienna

Royal Academy of Arts, London

4 November 2018 – 3 February 2019

The year 2018 marked the centenary of the deaths of two of Austria’s best-known and best-loved modernist artists – Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) and Egon Schiele (1890-1918). Although Klimt never formally taught Schiele, the younger man was widely thought of as his protégé, and, by the time of Klimt’s death from pneumonia, following a stroke, in February 1918, Schiele was acknowledged as his successor. Tragically, he, too, was to die, eight months later, in the flu pandemic. Although both artists left behind a great number of paintings, the core of each of their practices was drawing, which constituted a fundamental daily activity for them. Klimt left more than 4,000 drawings – most devoted to women; Schiele, in his short life, created 3,000 drawings and watercolours. The Graphic Art Collection of the Albertina Museum in Vienna, founded in 1776 by Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen, holds a large number of works on paper by both men, and, for this centennial collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts – one of many international anniversary exhibitions – 100 drawings have travelled to London, where they are displayed in largely chronological thematic rooms, interweaving the stories and progress of each artist.

Read the full review here

Review of Gabriele Münter: Painting to the Point at Museum Ludwig, Cologne

26/12/18

Gabriele Münter: Painting to the Point

Museum Ludwig, Cologne

15 September 2018 – 13 January 2019

The German painter Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) holds a special place in my heart, since, at the age of 17, I spent the summer in the small and charming Bavarian Alpine town of Murnau, completing a language course at the Goethe Institute, and there encountered for the first time the work of Münter and her contemporaries. For it was in Murnau that the Berlin-born artist settled in 1909; there that she and Russian émigré artist Wassily Kandinsky lived together in the “Yellow House”, which went on to become the birthplace of the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider group of expressionist artists); and there that she continued to live until her death, at the age of 85. The Staffelsee (the lake on the shores of which Murnau sits), the onion-shaped dome atop the church tower, and the purple and green Alps in the distance are all sights that warm my heart, much as they must have done Münter’s, given the number of times that she painted them. As soon as I read the announcement about Gabriele Münter: Painting to the Point, at the Museum Ludwig, this exhibition was therefore a must for me. 

Read the full review here

Review of London 1938: Defending ‘Degenerate’ German Art at the Liebermann-Villa am Wannsee, Berlin

12/12/18

London 1938: Defending ‘Degenerate’ German Art

Liebermann-Villa am Wannsee, Berlin
7 October 2018 – 14 January 2019 

While – and rightly so – much is widely known about the “degenerate art” exhibition staged by the Nazis at the Archaeological Museum in Munich in the summer of 1937, showing around 650 works of art from 20,000 that had been collected, far less is known about the response, which opened at the New Burlington Galleries in London the following July, and showed more than 300 works of art by more than 65 of these “degenerate” German artists. To mark the 80th anniversary of what, according to Barbara Warnock of the Wiener Library in London, remains “the largest exhibition of modern German art that there has ever been in Britain”, the Liebermann-Villa – the villa built by the “degenerate” painter Max Liebermann, as his summer home and “lakeside palace” on the shore of Wannsee, just south-west of Berlin – has mounted an exhibition showcasing 30 of the original works. 

The team has worked closely with the Wiener Library – the world’s oldest archive of material on the Holocaust and the Nazi era – which also staged a small exhibition earlier this year, showing largely archival material and reproductions of some of the key works of art, along with artefacts and documents from its archives telling the story of displaced Jews arriving in Britain before the war. The focus of the exhibition in Berlin, however, lays far more firmly on the stories of the lenders to the 1938 exhibition, drawing on new research on the provenance histories of the works before and after the show.

Read the review here

Review of Renoir Father and Son: Painting and Cinema at Musée d’Orsay, Paris

02/12/18
Renoir Father and Son: Painting and CinemaMusée d’Orsay, Paris
6 November 2018 – 27 January 2019

Walking into the side galleries in the impressive Musée d’Orsay, Paris, on a wet and windy late-autumn day, there is suddenly the feeling of spring – a girl laughs as she gaily swings back and forth, and a young couple promenade, doe-eyed, enjoying the first throes of young love. In black and white, these scenes play out on a loop on a large screen – extracts from some of the best-known and best-loved early films by the French film director Jean Renoir (1894-1979), while, on the surrounding walls, colour luminesces, as the same – or very similar – scenes are frozen, like screen grabs, on the canvases of his father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), the impressionist painter. 

And so it goes on for the duration of the exhibition, which fills the galleries along the length of the first floor of the museum: Renoir-father and Renoir-son interspersed and in conversation – repeated motifs, repeated scenery, repeated models. The idea is not to place Jean in his father’s shadow, but to explore the extent to which his father’s legacy, and their close relationship, with Jean’s intimate understanding of his father’s painting process, influenced his directing career – either in terms of deliberately paying homage to, or deliberately seeking to move away from, such ascendancy. As Jean said towards the end of his career: “I have spent my life trying to determine the extent of the influence of my father upon me,” going on to describe his ambivalence and the periods “when I did my utmost to escape from it to dwell upon those when my mind was filled with the precepts I thought I had gleaned from him”.

Read the full review here

Review of Lotte Laserstein: Face to Face at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt

19/11/18

Lotte Laserstein: Face to Face

Städel Museum, Frankfurt
19 September 2018 – 17 March 2019

Face to face. An appropriate title for an exhibition so largely comprised of portraits – among them a large proportion of self-portraits. For, surrounded by these canvases of Lotte Laserstein (1898-1993), one feels beset by myriad pairs of eyes. She is usually categorised as an artist of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), alongside her male contemporaries Otto Dix, George Grosz and Christian Schad, but her style is really quite different from theirs – devoid of political satire and containing far more empathy, intimacy, and, dare I say it at the risk of sounding disingenuous, femininity. 

Laserstein grew up in a very female environment, with her mother, her sister, Käte, and her aunt and grandmother, following the death of her father in 1902. Fortunately, there was enough family money for both daughters to study and Laserstein was one of the first generation of women accepted into the Berlin Art Academy, in 1921 – two large charcoal drawings of male nudes evidence that she also attended life classes while there. Bear in mind that she was painting at the same time as, for example, the artists of the expressionist group, Die Brücke, and her style might seem a little old fashioned and venerating of art history – “more academy than avant garde”, as Kolja Reichert wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (23 September 2018). One hypothesis put forward by the exhibition texts is that, belonging to this first generation of educated female artists, she lacked the rebellious streak of many of her male contemporaries, wishing instead to prove her technical ability. Vermeer, for example, was one artist she openly declared to be a great influence on her, and aspects of the Dutch master’s style can be detected, especially, perhaps, in her choice of palette.

Read the full review here

Review of A New Spirit Then, A New Spirit Now, 1981-2018 at Almine Rech Gallery

A New Spirit Then, A New Spirit Now, 1981-2018

Almine Rech Gallery, London

2 October – 17 November 2018

In 1981, the Royal Academy of Arts, London, hosted a seminal presentation of 20th-century painting, co-curated by Norman Rosenthal, Christos M Joachimides and Nicholas Serota. At a time when the relevance of figurative painting was in question, these three white male curators put together an equally all-male exhibition, comprising more than 150 works by 38 established and emerging artists, arguing persuasively that there was life in the old dog yet – and, moreover, that an old dog could be taught new tricks. Alongside older generation painters, such as Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning and the godfather of modern painting, Pablo Picasso, the exhibition introduced a number of young unknowns, including Francesco Clemente and Gerhard Richter. 

Now, nearly four decades later, Rosenthal has curated an, albeit significantly condensed, follow-up, revisiting this defining moment in his curatorial career, and re-posing the still-pertinent question about the relevance of painting in an art world so dominated by the conceptual, multimedia, and, increasingly, the virtual. This time, 15 artists have been selected, with a painting each, 13 of them from the original roll call, with two women – Maria Lassnig and Susan Rothenberg – added, Rosenthal says, as a “kind of apology” and to redress the balance (if two out of 15 can be said to do that!). Apart from Picasso’s L’Homme au chapeau de paille (1964), all the works have been made since the first exhibition ended (in fact, all but his and Lassnig’s, since 2000).

Read the full review here

Review of Frida Kahlo: Making Herself Up at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

07/09/18

Frida Kahlo: Making Herself Up

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

16 June – 4 November 2018

Everyone knows something of the tragic story of Frida Kahlo (1907-54) – the polio, contracted when she was six, which left her right leg thinner than her left and caused her to limp; the accident, when she was 18, the after-effects of which reverberated throughout the rest of her short life, forcing her to undergo multiple operations and spend much time bed bound; her tempestuous relationship and on-off marriage with the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957); her affairs with Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, as well as with various female friends; her now iconic monobrow and her unconventional and folkloric style of dress – and there is a flourishing yet morbid fascination with her tale. Children around the world wear flowery Frida-style hairpieces; teenage girls have Daft Punk Frida T-shirts; even grown men can be spotted with Frida socks. There are also numerous self-help-style inspirational books in which Kahlo stars as role-model-cum-heroine. 

Thankfully, her artworks are recognisable, too – at least, her self-portraits are known through multiple reproductions, even if often distorted and graphicalised into a contemporary branded derivation. Sadly, encounters with the works themselves are rarer, and, having read reviews of this much-hyped and long-awaited blockbuster exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, they were not something I was especially banking on encountering. The focus is, instead, on Kahlo’s biography and, principally, the treasure trove of artefacts and paraphernalia uncovered, when, in 2004, the seal was broken on the bathroom in her lifelong home Casa Azul (the Blue House, in Coyoacán, south of Mexico City – now the Museo Frida Kahlo), which, for 50 years following her death, had been kept locked, as dictated shortly before his death by Rivera. Nevertheless, true art fans needn’t despair or indeed avoid the exhibition altogether, for there are enough paintings to render the battle with the crowds worthwhile, even if you may ultimately leave with somewhat mixed feelings.

Read the full review here

Review of Patrick Heron at Tate St Ives

16/07/18

Patrick Heron 

Tate St Ives

19 May – 30 September 2018

and

Turner Contemporary, Margate

19 October 2018 – 6 January 2019

It has been a momentous 12 months for Tate St Ives – reopening in October 2017 following a four-year building project, led by Jamie Fobert Architects, to add nearly 600sq metres of gallery space, doubling the existing area – and, in recognition of this, achieving the accolade, worth £100,000, of Art Fund Museum of the Year 2018. The new four-storey extension, with its tall, sky-lit exhibition space, is currently host to the first major exhibition in two decades of works by the local – and hugely significant postwar British abstract artist – Patrick Heron (1920-99), who always wanted his paintings to be seen at different times of day, in different light, just as they can be here.

Read the full review here

London Photography Round-Up, May 2018

12/05/18

London Photography Round-Up

May 2018

Published in the May 2018 issue of The Burlington Magazine

Review of Emil Nolde: Colour Is Life at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

23/04/18

Emil Nolde: Colour Is Life

National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
14 February – 10 June 2018

If one had to pull out the key themes or threads running through the work of the German expressionist painter and printmaker Emil Nolde (1867-1956), they would certainly include flowers and gardens, dancers and cabaret singers, races and types, religious imagery, and then, and perhaps overarchingly, colour and light. “Colour is strength, strength is life,” he is known to have said, and he certainly used colour as the primary vehicle for expressing himself and bringing his canvases and pages vibrantly to life. So much so, in fact, that entering the first room of the National Gallery of Ireland’s retrospective, which draws its title from this quote, the paintings, set against dark blue (and later red) walls, seem positively to glow, as if lit from within. “Every colour harbours its own soul, delighting or disgusting or stimulating me,” Nolde further wrote. “Yellow can depict happiness and also pain. Red can mean fire, blood or roses; blue can mean silver, the sky or a storm.”

Read the full review here