|
|
|
|
WELCOME TO THE EAST FINCHLEY OPEN ARTISTS APRIL NEWSLETTER
|
|
|
This Month - Interplay Exhibition - Classical Greece et al - Cats in Art - Members News - Van Gogh Self Portraits - and more
If you are viewing on gmail remember to click 'display images' and 'view entire message' when you reach the bottom.
|
|
|
THIS MONTH, EITHER SIDE OF EASTER, OUR NEXT EXHIBITION 'INTERPLAY'
AT THE ORIGINAL GALLERY,
HORNSEY LIBRARY, CROUCH END, N8
PRIVATE VIEW - 12th APRIL - ALL WELCOME
|
|
|
NOTE; In previous publicity we had hoped to run the exhibition until Sunday 23rd April but it will now close at 5pm on Saturday 22nd.
|
|
This month's ramblings look at beauty, sculpture and the body
MIKE COLES writes:-
|
|
Classical Greece was a roughly 200 year period between 510 BC and 323 BC - an era of unprecedented political and cultural advancement.
Donatello, born 1386, was a leading Italian sculptor of the Renaissance period, now featuring in a major exhibition at the V & A. museum.
Michael Jordan was an American basketball player – widely regarded as the best of all time.
A Hard Man is Good to Find is an exhibition at the Photographers Gallery
|
|
Idealistic perfection and beauty in the human body – you could say it all started in Classical Greece.
A key early work that most people will be familiar with is the ‘Discus Thrower’, by an early Greek sculptor known as Myron in 460 BC.
The original bronze statue is lost but is survived by numerous Roman copies.
This marble version, known as Discobolus Palombara, was the first copy of this sculpture to have been discovered, and was found in 1781 at a Roman property of the Massimo family, the Villa Palombara, on one of the seven hills of Rome.
In 1937, Adolf Hitler negotiated to buy it, and eventually succeeded in 1938
|
|
|
The Italian Foreign Minister sold it to him for five million lire, (around £2.5 m today), despite the protests of the Minister of Education, and the Italian academic community. It was shipped by rail to a museum in Munich but was returned to Italy in 1948.
The concept that a ‘beautiful’ body was desirable started when the ancient Greeks considered it to be direct evidence of having a beautiful mind. Following on, if you were considered beautiful then you were automatically a good person. This is a concept that we still follow today, consciously or subconsciously. For decades ‘villains’ portrayed in film, television and theatre tended to be society’s view of ‘ugly’ whereas the hero is generally considered ‘attractive’
Before we go any farther it’s important to recognise that these ideals are predominately ‘Western’ - although followed to a greater or lesser extent by most societies in the world, and the basis for a multi-billion pound make-up and fashion industry.
According to Ruth Lorand, professor of philosophy at Haifa University, and an expert on historical concepts of beauty “The ancient Greeks ascribed beauty to things that are morally good, appropriate, and pleasing, be they natural objects or artifacts, tangible and concrete or abstract, personal deeds, or social institutions”.
The earliest theorization of beauty comes from the works of ancient Greek philosophers. They believed that beauty consisted of three major components including symmetry, proportion, and harmony and saw a strong connection between beauty and mathematics, noting that ‘the eye was more attracted to beauty as a form of order’. The association between beauty and feeling suggests that ‘beauty is not only an objective quality, but an emotion evoked by the object’
Ruth Lorand continues: “At a recent conference, upon expressing my interest in beauty and its relation to art, a colleague responded: “Oh, beauty is such a difficult concept, and it is so eighteenth century….” I certainly agree with the former part, but I entirely disagree with the latter. Indeed, beauty is a difficult concept. In fact, these are the concluding words of Hippias Major, the dialogue which Plato devoted to an inquiry into the concept of beauty. The interest in beauty was revived in the eighteenth century after its widespread dismissal by the rationalists of the seventeenth century. Is it then an eighteenth-century concept? Beauty is as relevant now as it was at the time of Plato and of Kant simply because it has never ceased to be of interest in everyday life”.
There is also the connection between beauty and pleasure that drives the human desire to be ‘beautiful’. In contemporary Western society, attraction to beauty impacts personal choices with the potential for positive (or negative) outcomes.
Bringing the Greek ideals up to date, modern American culture favours not only symmetry, proportion, and harmony, but clear skin, and youth. Because less than one per cent of people are born with these features, many are willing to alter their own appearances to conform to these standards. Women, and some men, all around the world apply makeup daily with the intent of enhancing some facial features while masking other perceived imperfections - (don’t mention the wrinkles!) In addition to cosmetics you can throw in clothing, accessories, and hairstyles – all to conform to their society’s’ specific ideals of beauty.
“The Anglo-European model of fair hair and light skin remains the principle ideal for men and women in the Western beauty industry today. This is due in large part to the globalization of beauty ideals. It is the constant repetition of these ideals via media that positions the Anglo-European ideal of beauty as universal. For example, the Anglo-European heritage is heavily represented in American advertisements for beauty products for women, where physical beauty is a significant feature. As well as fair hair and light skin North American and European media specifically depicts the ideal woman as having a thin body with long legs, light eyes and no wrinkles. Promoting this message is central to a woman's value and social role. With these standards in place, the media acts not only as a proponent of physical expectations, but also an agent of judgement. Society places extreme value on physical appearance as a factor determining worth. Similar values extend to men but are not as extreme if money and power are taken into account. Many people struggle with body image issues thanks to this consistent pressure to live up to the values placed on physical beauty.”
All very heady stuff - thanks America – and we know about these things really, but still buy into them!
But meanwhile back in antiquity.
The Romans continued to uphold the Greek values of beauty and perfection in their sculpture but as the Western world went into the Dark Age’s, classical beauty, as represented in art, took a back seat until the Renaissance in Italy in the 14th century.
Enter Donatello
|
|
|
Left; Donatello's first marble David made when he was in his twenties. Centre and Right: His controversial 1440 bronze version.
|
|
Donatello di Niccolo di Betto Bardi, or just Don to his friends, was born c. 1386, in Florence and died there in 1466. He was an Italian sculptor. In his teens, rather than an apprenticeship with an established sculptor, he learned stone carving from the sculptors of the Florence Cathedral (c. 1400), and in 1404 his obvious talent took him to the workshop of Lorenzo Ghiberti. a sculptor in bronze who in 1402 had won the competition to make the doors of the Baptistery in Florence.
As Donatello's career progressed, he developed a personal style which was more dramatic and emotional than his peers. As well as classical Greek sources he drew heavily on reality for inspiration. He was not religious; in fact, he was openly gay, which was in direct conflict with both the religious and secular laws at the time. Punishments were heavy but his patrons in the Medici family kept him out of jail (or worse!).
Apparently, patrons often found him hard to deal with, in a day when artists’ working conditions were regulated by guild rules. Donatello seemingly demanded a measure of artistic freedom. His friends attest that he was a connoisseur of ancient art. He had a more detailed and wide-ranging knowledge of ancient sculpture than any other artist of his day.
He had already done a marble statue of David, (of David and Goliath fame), early in his career but in 1440, 32 years later, he set about another version in bronze which would become his most famous work.
Not being religious, the inspiration for this second David likely came from somewhere else; perhaps it was simply his desire to craft a lithe, graceful youth in a stance of celebration and triumph, although this explanation didn’t convince the tongue-waggers. It's known that he had wanted to experiment with bronze and this second David was the first freestanding bronze statue of a nude in the Western art world. The statue was controversial at the time, and thereafter, due to the sexual connotations some experts took note of, such as the wing from the giant's helmet which rests along the length of David's leg.
He was then, and still considered now, the greatest European sculptor of the 15th century, influencing painters as well as sculptors, and was one of the founders of the Renaissance style.
“David's pose is graceful and even effeminate; his right hip is thrust slightly outward, his left hand on left hip, in a stance of undeniable femininity. Some scholars claim that if not for the presence of male genitalia, David could be taken for a woman. Adding to the feminine overtones is the absurdly oversized sword David is gripping in his left hand, his "helmet" (which more closely resembles a French lady's hat), and the delicate curves that make up his thighs and torso.”
In any event, David remains a cornerstone of Western art and a timeless piece of art history.
There is a full-size plaster cast of the second (bronze) David, (with a broken sword) in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which, presumably, is included in the current exhibition and also a full-size white marble copy in the Temperate House at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew,
|
|
Michael Jordan
Referring back to the Greek 'Discus Thrower' it’s now become popular to celebrate retired sportsmen with an idealistic statue in heroic pose, usually outside their home stadium or in their home town. I don’t know of any Premiership football team that doesn’t have at least one of these, let alone every other sport from athletics to wrestling,
As an example, Michael Jordan (born 1963) was an American basketball player and his statue outside his home court in Chicago is typical of the genre with the same aspiration as the original Greek discus thrower.
|
|
|
|
The 2,000-pound (907.2 kg) bronze sculpture, is 12 feet (3.7 m) tall, and rests on a 5-foot high black granite base that has an inscription reading "The best there ever was. The best there ever will be." The base also includes a list of his accomplishments. However, modern sensitivities insist that he keep his shorts on.
|
|
|
left: - 'Suits you sir!' right - 'Watch out with that iron!'
|
|
A Hard Man is Good to Find is an exhibition currently on at the Photographers Gallery off Oxford Street.
It charts over 60 years of ‘queer’ photography of the male physique and focuses on the geography of the clandestine gay culture that emerged in post-war Britain. The show is structured through areas of London that were known for attracting ‘queer’ communities and related image making practices.
This might be open air sites where men could see and be seen, such as Highgate Men’s Pond or the Serpentine Lido, but it also includes areas that offered furnished rooms for rent that were popular with single gay men, such as Pimlico or Notting Hill.
“While the 1955 Wolfenden Report and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act marked the partial decriminalisation of gay sexual activity, prompting gay liberation and the fight for social equality; any depiction of male nudity which suggested homosexuality remained subject to the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, which made making or distributing such images a criminal offence. A clandestine visual culture emerged, regulated by laws which enforced homosexuality as invisible. In turn, it directly fed the defiant, overt visuality of gay men’s bodies that emerged in the post-war period. The tension between invisibility and visibility was negotiated through ideas about the male body drawn from art, physical culturists, and pornography – both home-grown and imported”.
From the Photographers Gallery publicity –
“Covering the 1930s to early 1990s, many works are exhibited at the Photographers Gallery for the first time including Keith Vaughan’s Highgate Men’s Pond album, a modernist photo collage made in 1933; ‘The Portobello Boys’, an anonymous and striking portfolio of young men taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s in North Kensington. A set of archetypes, ‘The Londoners’, documented in the late 1960s by Anthony C Burls (trading as Cain of London) and Martin Spenceley’s street portraits of subcultural men photographed in Euston in the 1980s. The hinge of this history is the posing pouch, a modest fabric covering for the male genitals developed by gay physique photographers to show as much of the 2 male body as possible. Its origins lie in the US, in the Athletic Model Guild established by Bob Mizer in 1945, although there is evidence of it being worn for sunbathing in London in the early 1930s. An original 1950s posing pouch will on display in the exhibition. Employed to circumvent the ban on full nudity (which included the postal system), the pouch was also painted on mail order reproductions so that customers could rub them off once received in the post. The sighting and dematerialising of the posing pouch is key to thinking through how such images were consumed, and how queer erotic’s were discursively constructed from imaginative forms of resistance to power and oppression.”
Although this piece is mainly about male bodies it’s worth noting that for women some of the real and harmful consequences of Western beauty standards include the existence of skin-bleaching creams, hair discrimination, the demonisation of dark-skinned women in the media, fatphobia, ableism, and much more, and that’s before we consider plastic surgery, anorexia nervosa and self-harm - or worse.
We have all internalised these messages, and they are hard to escape.
The male gaze perpetuates Western and Eurocentric beauty. Women also have an internalised male gaze, and this quote from Margaret Atwood best sums it up: “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
Donatello -Sculpting the Renaissance at the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, London SW7
Until 11th June 2023
https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/donatello-sculpting-the-renaissance
A Hard Man is Good to Find – a photographic exhibition is on at the Photographers Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1 (nearest tube Oxford Circus)
Also until 11th June 2023
https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/hard-man-good-find
|
|
Top EFOA printmaker Dawn Finn is at the Barbican Library - 4th to 29th April
PRIVATE VIEW Wednesday 5th April 6 - 8.30pm
Barbican Library
Barbican Centre
London EC2Y 8DS
Makers at the City Edge | Barbican
Dawn’s layering of colour invites the viewer into the inspirational complexity of abstract expressionism that embraces a sense of balance and belonging in her latest unique monotypes exhibited at The City Edge exhibition at the Barbican library throughout April.
|
|
Cats in Art - So it's come to this! - surely just a nice little footnote - there can't be many cats in serious art?
Wrong, wrong - every major artist seems to have included a cat at some time.
However, we have to start with British artist Louis Wain - the doyen of cat artists.
|
|
Louis William Wain was born in Clerkenwell, London on 5 August 1860.
His father was a salesman for a textile firm: his mother, of French emigré descent, designed church embroideries and carpets.
He studied at the West London School of Art, (later part of the London Polytechnic and now Chelsea School of Art), and began his career as an art journalist, drawing many different subjects. However, it was for his pictures of cats that he eventually became famous. From the 1880s until the outbreak of the First World War, the ‘Louis Wain cat’ was hugely popular. Appearing in vast quantities in prints, books, magazines, post-cards and annuals, Wain’s cats are to be found engaging in every form of human activity - from playing cricket, digging up roads, and riding bicycles, to parading the latest fashions at Ascot and making pompous after-dinner speeches at the club.
Despite his fame Wain never made much money, not being a good businessman, and during the First World War he began to suffer real poverty. Always known as being somewhat eccentric, he now began to develop signs of serious mental disorder. Previously a mild and gentle man, he became increasingly suspicious, abusive, and occasionally even violent towards his sisters with whom he lived.
Eventually, in June 1924, he was certified insane and committed to Springfield Hospital (the former Surrey County Asylum) at Tooting. ‘Discovered’ here the following year, he was transferred to Bethlem Hospital after a campaign by admirers of his work, including the Prime Minister Ramsey Macdonald.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg - here are some other cats painted by famous artists:-
|
|
|
From the top - left to right:- Paul Klee, Phillippe Hasman/Dali, Felix Valloton, David Hockney, Theofile Steinlen. Jeff Koons, Margarite Gerard, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso
|
|
Before cameras and smartphones if you wanted a selfie you had to paint it yourself. Van Gogh was big on self portraits - we know of at least 36 of them plus drawings and sketches too, completed over a period of just 10 years.
To his sister he wrote, "I should like to paint portraits which appear after a century to people living then as apparitions. By which I mean that I do not endeavor to achieve this through photographic resemblance, but my means of our impassioned emotions, that is to say using our knowledge and our modern taste for color as a means of arriving at the expression and the intensification of the character".
Of painting portraits, Van Gogh wrote: "in a picture I want to say something comforting as music is comforting. I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to communicate by the actual radiance and vibration of our colouring".
Here are most of them.
|
|
|
OUR CHARITY OF THE YEAR
East Finchley Open Artists are pleased to announce the Finchley Foodbank as our Charity of the Year
The Finchley Foodbank was founded in 2013 and is a joint project of St Mary's RC Church, East Finchley and other local churches and organisations.
They provide approximately three days of emergency food for people living in financial hardship in the London Borough of Barnet. This is done through two weekly sessions at St Mary's parish centre where clients can choose items of food and toiletries.
|
|
ABOUT EAST FINCHLEY OPEN ARTISTS
Find out about us on our website www.eastfinchleyopen.org.uk
There you will find details of all our current members plus photo's of their work and contact details plus information on recent and upcoming exhibitions
MEMBERSHIP: If you are interested in joining East Finchley Open Artists please contact the Membership Secretary at membership@eastfinchleyopen.org.uk
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
