Skip to main content

Rembrandt & van Hoogstraten: The Art of Illusion

It takes a split second these days to create an image, and how many millions are recorded daily on mobile phones, possibly never to be looked at again? You can see it all happening in the palatial surroundings of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, definitely one of those tick-off destinations on many travellers' bucket lists, where those in search of instant pictorial satisfaction throng the imposing statue-lined staircase for a selfie or pout for a photo in the café under the spectacular cupola. But we're not in Vienna for a quick fix, we're at the KHM to admire something more enduring in the shape of art produced almost 500 years ago by Rembrandt and his pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten that was intended to mislead your eyes into seeing the real in the unreal. Artistic deception is the story at the centre of  Rembrandt--Hoogstraten: Colour and Illusion , one of the most engrossing and best-staged exhibitions we've seen this year. And, somewhat surprisingly, a show wi...
Post a Comment

Subscribe to updates

There's Still Life in Britain!

When the Louvre put on a huge retrospective of the genre of still life in 2022-23, there were only five works by British artists on show out of a total of nearly 170. Brits don't do still life? Wrong, as shown in The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, with some 140 artworks. Some are beautiful, some are arresting, some are utterly surprising; one or two are downright weird. Boring? Not these still lifes. 

The show starts off traditionally enough, with paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries, some the work of immigrant artists from the Low Countries, but some home-grown: Right here in Chichester, the three Smith Brothers were among the earliest English artists to specialise in still lifes, and here you can see the work of the eldest, William, with a choice array of fruit, and of George, with as English a theme as you could get, a joint of beef. 

The second room takes us into the start of the 20th century, where the emphasis is very much on British Post-Impressionists, drawn to the work of Manet, Cezanne and Gauguin, as you can discover in paintings like Still Life with Apples by Spencer Gore, with a bowl of fruit taking centre-stage on the edge of a dramatically cropped table against an elaborate carpet and curtains. All painted very flat, but a riot of colour. More subdued but equally striking is The Cup and Saucer by Harold Gilman, like Gore a member of the Camden Town Group. While painters in earlier eras might have concentrated on rendering surfaces with illusory mastery, with Gore and Gilman it seems to be all about patterns and shapes. 

Prominent here too from slightly later, after World War I, are the Scottish Colourists, including JD Fergusson, with The Blue Lamp. They always seem so un-Scottish, the Colourists....
Then things start to take a surreal turn. Flowers they may be, but what to make of Lords and Ladies by Gluck, a very unsettling image indeed? 
Lords and ladies is a poisonous plant, and a suitable subject for the artist born Hannah Gluckstein but who challenged expectations of gender with androgynous clothes, short hair and a shortened name with "no prefix, no suffix, or quotes". Writing to her lover, she asked: "How can these flowers be female? Anything more male than this prominent feature I cannot imagine." 

The instability of the 1930s is summed up in this image by the pioneering colour photographer Yevonde, taken on the eve of World War II. 
A bust of Julius Caesar wears one of the gas masks issued to the British population amid fears of German gas attacks. The bright red geraniums seem to presage the bloodshed ahead.

After the end of the war, some artists headed for the Mediterranean to escape the dreariness of British austerity. Lucian Freud, though, doesn't seem to have quite captured the spirit of things in the sun. What is this? 
Well, it may look like the moon with those craters and a dark side, but this is an unripe green tangerine, life size. Quite bizarre. 

Some of our favourite pieces came in the section on Pop Art: Jann Haworth's soft sculpture Donuts, Coffee Cups and Comic features Willow-pattern crockery and even a Willow-pattern doughnut. The coffee's fabric too....
And maybe the news in that newspaper's a fabrication as well? 

Patrick Caulfield never regarded himself as a Pop Artist, but his strong outlines and fields of saturated colour from the 1960s show the influence of advertising in a similar way.
These glasses, bowl and jug are as traditional a still-life theme as you could conceive of, yet the execution was completely of the moment in 1967. 

Still life doesn't have to be objects on a table or a windowsill, of course. But it's very frequently concerned with everyday items, and in one eye-catching exhibit, yesterday's items are bagged up and ready to go in the bin. 
This is Gavin Turk's Dump, sitting in the corner of the gallery, looking for all the world like a plastic sack of rubbish. But this recreation is not at all what it seems, it's bronze, painted to look realistic. So this apparent waste is actually an expensive material, in a perplexing reversal of values. And, as Turk points out, if someone wants to spy on you, they can find out a lot by going through your bins: "We are what we throw away." 

So the curators in Chichester have really redressed that neglect in the Louvre with plenty of famous names represented in this very wide-ranging show. David Hockney, Richard Hamilton, Edward Burra, Dod Procter, Eric Ravilious and Rachel Whiteread are among the artists we haven't had space to mention. But we couldn't leave out Jane Simpson. Her vases and jugs entitled Our Distant Relatives have strangely anthropomorphic features and, being made of rubber rather than clay, wobble slightly in response to footsteps near the shelf they sit on. Still life that really moves.... 

Practicalities

The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain is on at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until October 20. The gallery is open from 1000 to 1700 Tuesdays to Saturdays and 1100 to 1700 on Sundays and bank holidays. Admission costs a standard £14, including a £1.50 Gift Aid donation, but you get 10% off if you book online, which you can do here. Allow yourself a good two hours to take it all in.  

The gallery is just a few minutes walk from Chichester station, to which there's a train every half hour from London Victoria Mondays to Saturdays. The journey takes about 90 minutes. Hourly trains on Sundays take longer. 

Images

John Duncan Fergusson (1874-1961), The Blue Lamp, 1920s, Rugby Art Gallery and Museum. © The Fergusson Gallery, Perth and Kinross Council, Scotland. Image credit: Rugby Art Gallery and Museum Art Collections
Gluck (1895-1978), Lords and Ladies, 1936, Private collection, London 
Madame Yevonde (1893-1975), Crisis (A.R.P.), 1939, National Portrait Gallery, London
Lucian Freud (1922-2011), Unripe Tangerine, 1946-47, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
Jann Howarth (b. 1942), Donuts, Coffee Cups and Comic, 1962, Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005), Coloured Still Life, 1967, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
Gavin Turk (b. 1967), Dump, 2004, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Opening and Closing in October

There's been a spate of exhibitions over the past few years aimed at redressing centuries of neglect of the work of women artists, and the Italian Baroque painter  Artemisia Gentileschi is the latest to come into focus, at the National Gallery in London, starting on October 3. Most of the works have never been seen in Britain before, and they cover a lengthy career that features strong female figures in Biblical and classical scenes, as well as self-portraits. Until January 24.  Also starting at the National on October 7 is a free exhibition that looks at Sin , as depicted by artists from Diego Velázquez and William Hogarth through to Tracey Emin, blurring the boundaries between the religious and the secular. This one runs until January 3.   Tate Britain shows this winter how JMW Turner embraced the rapid industrial and technological advances at the start of the 19th century and recorded them in his work. Turner's Modern World , starting on October 28, will inclu...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Thrill of Pleasure: Bridget Riley

Prepare yourself for some sensory overload. Curves, stripes, zig-zags, wavy lines, dots, in black and white or colour. Look at many of the paintings of Bridget Riley and you're unable to escape the eerie sensation that the picture in front of you is in motion, has its own inner three-dimensional life, is not just inert paint on flat canvas, panel or plaster. It's by no means unusual to see selections of Riley's paintings on display, but a blockbuster exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh brings together 70 years of her pictures in a dazzling extravaganza of abstraction, including a recreation of her only actual 3D work, which you walk into for a perspectival sensurround experience. It's "that thrill of pleasure which sight itself reveals," as Riley once said. It's a really terrific show, and the thrill of pleasure in the Scottish capital was enhanced by the unexpected lack of visitors on the day we went to see it, with huge empty sp...
Post a Comment
Read more

Angelica Kauffman: Breaking Through the 18th-Century Glass Ceiling

In the late 18th century, Angelica Kauffman was famous throughout Europe, one of the leading international painters of the day. A success in London, Venice and Rome, she attracted commissions from Catherine the Great, the Emperor of Austria and the Pope. She was a close friend of Goethe, a founding member of Britain's Royal Academy. When she died in 1807, her lavish funeral in Rome drew enormous crowds. A far from ordinary life, then. And for an 18th-century woman in the male-dominated world of art, an utterly extraordinary one. She achieved equal pay, got women wearing trousers, drew male nudes and even had a pre-nup. It's a story that's arrestingly told in  Angelica Kauffman: Artist, Superwoman, Influencer , a fine exhibition now on at the Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf that will be heading to London, and naturally the  Royal Academy , this summer. Kauffman was born in Chur in eastern Switzerland in 1741 and was a child prodigy, not just as a painter but also as a singer...
Post a Comment
Read more