We sit starving amidst our gold

On the face of it, neither the appearance nor the ideas of William Morris should appeal to the Now generation.  (Very) old, beardy, lefty – the attributes shout BORING.   As for floral wallpaper, ugh, how uncool is that?    Nothing should be less popular with the students of art, music and fashion who form today’s trenders.  So, as I mentioned before, it  surprises me that several leading and emerging artists like Grayson Perry, Jeremy Deller, David Mabb and (new to me) Kehinde Wiley should reference Morris in their recent work.  The first three are Brits, the fourth African-American, and at the Victoriana show at Guildhall I also spotted Brazilian-born, New Mexico resident Ligia Bouton’s delicate diptych The Adventures of William Morris Man in which our hero battles with robotic Owen Jones in comicbook style.

They mostly reference Morris’s political views as anarchic, anticapitalist precursors of Occupy and/or stuff-the-rich attitudes, and the tension between radical political views and the assumed English pastoralism of his designs energises the artworks.  Deller’s new installation at the William Morris Gallery yokes together further elements from stone-age axes to present-day prison art, and includes examples of Morris’s Socialist speeches and agitprop  juxtaposed with allusions to the dire situation for most Russians when the oligarchs carved up all economic assets in a capitalist carnival of exploitation.   In this clip, if still live, Deller succinctly outlines Morris’s impact on his thinking.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25808020

Wiley’s recent work is less overtly political, in the agit-prop sense, in its homage or appropriation of Morris’s floral designs.   Paintings based on photos of hip-hop Jamaicans whom the artist met on a visit to the island are set inside vividly manipulated versions of Morris wallpaper.  Given fanciful Anglo-aristocratic names that cast unnamed clubbers in the roles of the nobility, Wiley's montages aim to challenge all-white western portraiture.   According to a press interview:

“I’m in love with the tricks of coaxing paint into form, and making something that’s almost a Trojan horse.  Where it’s striking, it’s vibrant, and you think only later about some of the broader cultural or political implications, some of the power juxtapositions.  All those things are important but I don’t want to bore myself or anyone else for that matter, with making work that’s simply didactic.”

The decision to embed the sitters in multi-coloured Morris designs seems to be aimed at British audiences – the unsettling proximity of ‘traditional’ English design with assertive citizens of a former colony.  I hope Wiley is aware of William Morris’s anti-imperial, anti-colonial views; if not yet, maybe Jeremy Deller can assist………

Dragons and Daughters

Two other things I did yesterday: 

• get to see the almost-over exhibition of Chinese Painting at the V&A.  An art I find quite hard to appreciate, being so ignorant, but I was amazed and absorbed by the ten-metre-long scroll decorated with Nine Dragons surfing along on waves and winds, roaring and snarling as dragons do.    On the left in the display case illustrated above.  The artist is Chen Ron and the scroll, which is made up of joined sheets about 25cm wide, was drawn in and has survived from the thirteenth century.   My mind leapt to the dark stormclouds that have been barrelling in across Britain for the past couple of months, with hurricane gales, vasty seas, downpours and thunder rumbles, and I wondered if the meteorological phenomena are in fact driven by invisible dragons up in the sky…
  
• get to a performance of Handel’s oratorio Jephtha by Harry Christophers’ The Sixteen at the Barbican.  A horrible biblical story from some ancient BCE era in which a dutiful daughters like Iphigenia is almost killed by her father, here given a more or less happy resolution, and musically a clever balance of orchestra, soloists and choir that gave the whole piece a dramatic dispatch.

Comical however to see the concert announced thus on the illuminated info boards…

Self-Portraits

I spent yesterday presenting a the first week of a short course on Women Artists at the V&A, starting in the sixteenth century with Sofonisba Anguissola and moving on to Judith Leyster, Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Beale -  not eras or artists I am closely familiar with, though much of their work is well known and as accomplished as that of many male contemporaries.    

Two pictures are new to me:  this enchanting portrait of an unidentified young woman by Antwerp-born Caterina van Hemmesan, painted around 1550 and now to be found in the Bowes Museum – cue for a return visit.  The chaste palette enhances the sitter’s sober yet alert expression.  She is fingering her wedding ring, so this is presumably a wedding portrait?  It’s notable for the pictorial device of the shadow on the wall behind the sitter, endowing the flat image with an illusion of depth and making her seem very immediate to us.

The other picture is Gentileschi’s supposed self-portrait with a lute, from about 1615.   Artists often used themselves as models, so it may not have been intended as a selfie, though it evidently is.  The depiction is beautifully sensuous, with skin on bosom and hands that seems to glow with warmth and touchability. The lutenist's expression is curiously guarded; one can interpret it is quizzical - what does her audience think of the music? or don't look at my tits, listen to my playing.  As it turns out, the work is being sold by Christies in New York on 29 January.

Georgian Absences

Banking, insurance, sugar, rum :  in many respects the long eighteenth century owes all

its economic and cultural history to the profits and products of transatlantic slavery. 
For an excellent analysis of the shortcomings of the current exhibition Georgians Revealed at the British Library ,
see  reviews by Miranda Kaufman
http://lbsatucl.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/georgians-unrevealed/

and Norma Clarke in the TLS 20 December 2013 [link follows]

Morris vs. Rossetti

'They Never Throve Together' said Burne-Jones about  William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti

for my account of their friendship and rivalry, see: 

https://www.academia.edu/5431365/Morris_vs_Rossetti

Edmonia Lewis in London

 

While preparing a course on women artists, I’ve recently discovered that Edmonia Lewis, the Black American sculptor of mixed African and Ojibwe descent, spent her last years in London.    No one seems to know why she came to Britain or whom she knew here.  Born in New York in 1844, she had a difficult youth until enrolled at Oberlin College Ohio during the US Civil War.  She studied art and was funded to travel to Rome, where she flourished as a sculptor, mainly with dramatic marble figures.  Some, like Forever Free  and Hagar reference her African-American heritage, others like Indian Combat and Minehaha reference her Native American roots (Longfellow’s Hiawatha being based on Ojibwe tales)  Some were portrait busts, the Death of Cleopatra a full-length reclining figure, which went to the centennial exhibition in Philadelphia and was then lost and damaged before being rescued.  Her last recorded work was an Adoration of the Magi (1883).  It’s not yet known when she relocated to London but in 1901 the Census shows her residence as 37 Store Street, Bloomsbury (age 59; birthplace 'India'!; occupation 'artist / modeller', so she was still working in clay) and  at the time of her death in 1907 she was living in Blythe Road west London.  She was buried in St Mary’s the Catholic part of Kensal Rise cemetery.  Does anyone know any more about her time in Britain?

 

Lizzie Siddal : Her Play

It’s bad enough when dramatisations cast actors in fictional roles who look completely different from one’s mental conception of the character, but  ‘true story’ dramas can have the complication of real life likenesses working against audiences’ visual knowledge – a fact especially true of the main players in the popular Pre-Raphaelite sitcom, which sometimes seems endlessly rehearsed.  So heartfelt compliments to the casting director and cast of the new play at the Arcola Theatre, for their vivification of the chief characters, who vividly resemble the originals and convincingly portray them.  Although Rossetti is rather taller than in life, and Annie Miller too petite, Holman Hunt, John Ruskin (with a smug, half-fixed smile) and jaunty, confident John Millais are acutely rendered and all convey a highly plausible animation, while Emma West the actor playing Lizzie Siddal, with the pearlescent skin that often goes with copper hair,  could be her double.

The playwright Jeremy Green has taken on board recent scholarship on Siddal’s artistic aspirations to give her an active role in the PRB circle.  He resisted the temptation that often makes Rossetti’s charismatic personality dominate the drama, and remarkably has drawn Gabriel as the sexually reluctant partner in the relationship (as I have always thought) albeit without quite explaining this.  The first half of the evening is high-spirited and upbeat, successfully conveying the PRBs’ youthful optimism – I particularly liked how each young man declared himself a genius – and deftly navigates the shoals of period misrepresentation.   I should confess to an offstage ‘appearance’ as a Mrs Marsh, whose grizzling twins have required nearly all the shopkeeper’s supply of laudanum, but an irritating anachronism to show it being glugged directly from the bottle.  
The true pitfall of this type of drama is the perceived need to stick to historical fact, which tends to fill the scenes with narrative, unneeded by those who don’t know the story and annoying to those who do. In Siddal’s case the great obstacle is her now too-familiar death from an overdose while suffering from post-natal depression – a truly sad and pathetic end to her young life, but one that does not contain high-tension drama.   I wished Jeremy Green had departed more vigorously from historical fact, not perhaps to ignore her death but maybe show it differently, less inevitably, less pathetically.  Or to leave the audience guessing as to whether or how far Gabriel was responsible for that fatal dose – a subject on which opinion can still be forceful.

So, a somewhat too faithful re-telling that leaves scope for further episodes in the romance.