Silent Partners

A fascinating and informative exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum on artists’ use of mannequins or lay figures, an essential piece of studio equipment for centuries.  Chiefly used for maintaining the shape and fall of garments when the sitter or model had finished their sessions, these articulated, life-size dolls have their own uncanny presence, like puppets, life-like but lifeless, in relaxed or alert poses, seen but unseeing.  They are technical, practical objects like easels, mirrors, plinths, yet masquerade as humans, with plump or muscular limbs, which can stand, sit, recline, or simulate the flight of angels.

The exhibition, curated by Jane Munro, explores the practical, the jokey, the surreal and the uncanny aspects of the studio mannequins from the 18^th to 21^st centuries.  One serious aspect is the length to which artists used to go to conceal their use of stuffed or jointed figures, and how nonetheless glimpses are visible on the resulting canvases. Indeed, one effect of the exhibition is to see lay-figures behind or within the figures in every and any dramatic or convivial subject.  

In the 19^th century artists and critics mocked pictures with stiff or elaborately posed figures as ‘mannequinised’, with the apparatus showing through in scenes that claimed to depict total naturalism.   Felix Nadar drew a satire on Corbet’s Demoiselles au bord de la Seine as recumbent dummies,  which still makes one laugh.  And though it does not make the connection, the exhibition also prompted me to wonder about the relation between Manet’s nude Olympia and her near-contemporary mechanical namesake in the Tales of Hoffman.

 

Even if they like to imagine it, few viewers now think that Millais’s models for the couple in The Black Brunswicker actually embraced in the studio – especially as Kate Dickens posed for the woman – but the stagey nature of their clinch betrays the mannequin’s presence.  Though I’d guess this was more essential for the sake of the shimmering satin skirt than to avoid any impropriety.   The Pre-Raphaelite claim of painting directly ‘from nature’ – a claim magnified by their fans – is in my view not really undermined by the technical use of lay figures, especially where careful figure studies preceded painting.  But it suggests an interesting reason why poor Lizzie Siddal should have lain in Ophelia's bath-tub for so long – this was one pose where a wooden or fabric mannequin would not substitute for the live model. 

The exhibition contains some original mannequins, one supplied by the Roberson firm from which many of the PRB circle obtained their materials, with one of the enormous volumes detailing Millais’s account.  The ledger for Marie Spartali shows that typically hire of a female lay figure cost one pound a month, and a child’s figure 15 shillings.  Plus, in Spartali’s case, Robersons’ charge for delivery and collection; one envisages a shopman in his brown overalls carrying the effigy through the streets.

From such functional matters Silent Partners progresses to explore artists’ playful and performative relations with mannequins, which shade into Surrealists’ use and abuse of stuffed and live women and the Chapman Brothers’ grotesque and obscene figure installations.  One

unsettling example is Oscar Kokoschka's creation of a life-size soft-fur fetish of his adored but lost Alma Mahler, carried around and finally beheaded in rage.  Other fringe manifestations like talking dolls, tailors’ dummies and fashion mannequins are included, but surprisingly no link is made with waxworks, whose lifelikeness is their claim to fame.  But in fact the purpose of lay figures is to assist the illusion of reality, not enact it.   

Spaces of Black Modernism

Following Drawing over the Colour Line, Gemma Romain and Caroline Bressey have curated a room display at Tate Britain called Spaces of Black Modernism which extends Romain’s research into Black artists and models in London 1919-1939 and further augments knowledge of artists and artworks that have proved hard to find although hardly hidden.  

It’s exciting to see previously ‘unknown’ works that reveal social-artistic-musical spheres which included people of varied Black ancestries without being in any ghetto except that of the visual and performing arts, where the address is not inward-looking but to external audiences.  Which is Tate’s purpose too, so it’s good to see eclipsed artists featuring albeit on a modest scale compared to too-much Turner (given the several rooms already rightly occupied by his pictures) or the equally large latest spread by Turner prize nominees.

Spaces of Black Modernism raises further interesting questions about the role and experience of dark skin in Britain in the inter-war years; it also interrogates the patchy art history of that period, which may be coming back into fashion as it recedes further in time.  One sometimes feels that only art of the last five minutes or over a century ago attracts critical attention and, as Romain’s research shows, the less noisy and/or celebrity artists are not only forgotten but literally lost, until one-by-one paintings, sculptures, photographs are found again. 

It looks as if Black Modernism has further to go in recovering the past, and one looks forward to more manifestations, in different formats and venues, hopefully moving beyond London.  

Apologies for lack of captions here: I will aim to add these soon as both artists and sitters deserve to be named.

PS  Seek out the even smaller display of work by Marlow Moss, another casualty of history, in an adjacent Tate space.

Edward Carpenter

One of the many now-forgotten progressive figures who feature in Fiona MacCarthy's fascinating exploration of William Morris's legacy through politics and the creative professions from 1860-1960 now on at the National Portrait Gallery is Edward Carpenter, prophet of 'the simple life' lived on a comfortable if not lavish unearned income.  These are the Indian sandals he taught himself how to make, and wore in the belief that  human soles should be close to the earth.

More importantly, he lived in a same-sex relationship  decades before it was permissable, and solaced many young gay men whose lives were darkened by public and private homophobia.  
It's a shame Carpenter is not better known historically.  Even many contemporaries dismissed him as a crank.  Thus the artist Will Rothenstein:

'Carpenter had an affectionate nature and a real love for mankind, but his vision was too vague and he was over-attentive to faddists and theorists. He lacked the power of men like Ruskin and Morris; the most concrete thing he achieved was the sandal.' 

Roger Fry's early portrait in NPG is rather wonderful, presenting Carpenter as if he had just turned up at the studio and found it too chilly to take off his overcoat.  The half-glimpsed rear view in the mirror and the low pink buttoned chair seem to signal some kind of metaphors for Carpenter's personality - not altogether straight and narrow?   But he's wearing hard black city shoes: where were the sandals?

William Morris & Andy Warhol

I admit I was incredulous when first hearing of this forthcoming show.  Largely I suppose from Warhol’s reputation for celebrity solipsism, as if everything he touched was ipso facto worthy of attention, even adulation.  So unlike our dear WM, surely?

But at the WM Society last Saturday hearing Jeremy Deller preview his forthcoming show Love is Enough at Oxford MAO – see  here

persuaded me that the connections, parallels and comparisons between the two make for a thoughtful exploration of similarities and contrasts, in the same way as with English Magic Deller produced a creative-critical, if quirky, appraisal of WM’s life and works for today.  Flower-patterning in diverse colourways is just one of the unlikely meeting points; so are hand-crafted multiple reproductions,  and the promotion of collaborative enterprise over artistic individualism, within a contradictory context dominated by one figure.  Deller is moreover convinced that both WM and AW shared an anti-industrial, anti-capitalist political perspective, which is less persuasive but nonetheless provocative.   I am also intrigued by his choice of title, for as well as being well-nigh unreadable today, Love is Enough was one of WM’s failures in his repeated attempt to combine visual and verbal arts.  The words, decorations and typography just did not match up. and the endeavour was more or less abandoned. UPDATE BELOW  Moreover, the text dates from the years when for WM love was certainly not enough, indeed seriously lacking.  It may have been a substitute for the loss – temporary as it turned out – of Janey, but it was certainly extremely  melancholy.  So how will Jeremy present it?  i look forward to seeing. 

UPDATE 
indeed, as  Januszczak said in STimes: 'after seeing the exhibition I made the huge mistake of actually reading Love is Enough the pseudo-medieval morality play.  The exhibition is provocative and fun. The morality play is twaddle'  [You dont say!, though Janusczek is one of few to offer a simple account of the text.] 'it's an escape into the world of Lancelots and Guineveres so complete that if I were deciding on the categories I would file under Love Unhinged... a mad flight from the realities of late Victorian England.'    And  even worse as a literary endeavour.

Women's Guild of Arts

Women's History Seminar

Institute of Historical Research

University of London

Senate House

Malet Street

IHR at 17.15 (Room to be determined)

Friday, 31 October

Zoe Thomas (RHUL) ‘At Home’ with the Women’s Guild of Arts: Studio Spaces and Professional Artistic Identity in London 1880-1920

This paper considers the tactics middle-class women decorative artists used to construct professional artistic identity between 1880-1920. Using the Women’s Guild of Arts as its focus, the paper reflects on the importance members placed on having a studio. The paper reveals women artists increasingly attempted to acquire studios, be this separate to their home, or through the reforming of existing rooms. The studio permitted women a new site in which to partake in a range of artistic, social and egalitarian activity, perceived to at least ideologically be separate from the constraints of the domestic and the amateur. This research builds on the flourishing body of academic work locating the blurred nature of middle-class women’s professional and domestic lives in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century.

Rossetti's Obsession @ WMG

[this is Jill Iredale  ] 
 Opening of ROSSETTI’S OBSESSION at the William Morris Gallery on 3 October:  its third incarnation this year, centenary of Janey Morris’s death, and an exhibition which has evolved over the year so that each venue has seen a subtly different show, with absences and additions.

First thanks to Jill Iredale of Bradford Museums [above] who proposed and curated and came up with the title.

Constant elements throughout include the great pastel drawings from Bradford and the great Honeysuckle embroidery stitched by Jane and Jenny.   These two elements represent aspects of Janey Morris, showcased in exhibition:  the ‘real’ Jane – seen in photographs and sketches, letters and embroideries – and what can be called the ‘mythical’ Jane, in the roles of Pandora, Persephone, Astarte, Beatrice, seen in Rossetti’s drawings.  We don’t confuse an actress with the parts she plays but still we interpret Jane through his obsessional representations of an alluring but moody femme fatale.

Thanks also to Rupert Maas who offered to the WMG the fine red chalk vision of Jane both as herself and as Tennyson’s Mariana, which makes a great addition to the show.

Jane remarkably transformed herself from a poverty-stricken childhood into a woman of culture and creativity, an active member of the William Morris family firm.   It also says something for the unavailability of divorce in the Victorian age that the Morris marriage survived the troubles she caused it, becoming a loving and mutually supportive partnership.  Jane devoted her widowhood to preserving and promoting Morris’s legacy, so we should thank her too.  

Rossetti’s Obsession is not a blockbuster but a jewel of an exhibition.  Thanks and congratulations to all involved. 

A prompt and appreciative review in Apollo

here

William III's Blacks from the plantations of the Netherlands

What is known of the '200 Blacks' who came to Britain 'to attend the Horse' with the 200 gentlemen who formed the retinue of William of Orange when he landed at Brixham and proceeded via Exeter to London in 1688?

In a broadside published a week after William's triumphal entry into Exeter  there was an account a bit like a press report, which was republished mostly verbatim a year later by John Whittle in An Exact Diary of the Late Expedition of His Illustrious Highness, the Prince of Orange His Publick Entrance Into Exeter:

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Since the foundation of Monarchy, Imperial Orations or the triumphs of the Cæsars, in the Manner, Grandeur and magnificence of their most sumptuous cavalcades, there was never any that exceeded this of the most Illustrious Hero the Prince of Orange his Entrance into Exeter, which was in manner and form following:

1. The Right Honourable the Earl of Macclesfield with 200 horse, the most part of which were English Gentlemen, Richly mounted on Flanders Steeds, manag’d and us’d to war in Headpieces, Back and Brest, Bright Armour.
2. 200 Blacks brought from the plantations of the Netherlands in America, Imbroyder’d Caps lined with white Fur and plumes of white Feathers to attend the Horse.
3. 200 Finlanders or Laplanders in Bear Skins taken from the Wild Beasts they had slain, the common Habbit of that cold Climat, with black Armour and Broad Flaming Swords.

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In the Royal Collection is  a contemporary painting of William's landing,

from which not a lot can be seen, certainly not any white feathered caps,  though here enlargement   http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/402861/william-iii-prince-of-orange-arriving-at-brixham#.VCryuGVvHcE.favorites

and an engraving after Kneller of William himself shows him with an African-descent attendant, holding a helmet to match the king's back and breast armour, though this should not be taken literally

engraving British Museum 

I'm hoping someone has done lots of research on Orange William  and the Netherlands' plantations in the Caribbean....