30 September, 2009
This exhibition, held at Tate Britain in early 2009, will I am sure be seen as a milestone in years to come. Its success, like all success, was I am sure down to hard work, and in this case amazing scholarship, undertaken by a raft of erudite contributors headed by Karen Hearn, the curator.
Whilst it would be practically impossible not to put on a good show of Sir Anthony van Dyck’s work, this exhibition does much, much more than that; it demonstrates how van Dyck set the benchmark for portraiture from the seventeenth century to this day.
Van Dyck was one of a number of artists (painters, composers, architects etc.) who travelled to England for work at this time. These artists must have been a mobile group willing to travel and London must have had a good reputation as a receptive and appreciative place to be. For those amongst us who are not scholars this might seem a strange idea, especially if you have been brought up on the ideal of ‘fortress Britain, standing alone...’ etc.
This wave of workers, like many before and after, flattered us; they made our concert halls ring out with new and exciting music, our stately homes flourish and most importantly portrayed royalty and nobility in a most flattering light. Why, you may ask, would they do this? The short answer has to be that they did it for money, and if you are a commercial artist your aim has to be to delight your clients while bearing in mind that if you want to be paid and be given more work, you do not stray too far from the brief.
That broad description of commissioned artists covers a wide range of abilities from the hack to the genius, and the genius of van Dyck was that he combined commercial expediency with innovation, skill and vision. He also used his talents wisely in a way that reminds me of how an art director today works, adding that bit of magic to a job while orchestrating carefully chosen suppliers around him. He also instinctively knew just how far to push things.
Van Dyck concentrated his efforts on the composition, to me the single most important skill an artist can possess, and his next priority was imbuing the face of his sitter with an animated personality. The rest he pretty much left to his chosen suppliers; the cloth painting expert, someone good at hands, someone else who could be relied upon to brush in a good back ground.
In common with practices at the time, there was some extra margin to be made from producing additional copies of the work knocked off by an assistant at a good price; these could be the full length painting or a head and shoulders, depending on budget. A miniaturist might also be employed to make further copies while the painting was drying in the studio.
How did van Dyck manage all this activity? Pretty much like any modern studio – he had a price list. £60 for a full length, £30 for half length and £20 for a head and shoulders and assistant to help get through the something like 400 commissions during his time in England. I estimate, based on my experience of running a commercial studio that he had to get 2 works out the door every week.
I also estimate (based on average earnings) that his studio turned over about £4m a year in today’s money and the average commission was around £75,000 – I am not sure Lucien Freud would get his brushes wet for that – but pricing definitely in the top quartile.
I have not said anything about the paintings and the man’s undoubted genius, and I will do at a later date, but I think you can tell from this introductory piece I have huge admiration for the guy.
30 September, 2009
Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) and Liubov Popova (1889-1924) had great timing; they were around for the Russian Revolution and got involved with Constructivism in its infancy. Constructivism is a popular and widely recognised movement and was itself a product of the revolution.
Constructivism takes the artist out of art. The artist becomes genderless and is an engineer of colour, shape and form, rejecting representation and throwing off ‘the dead weight of the real world’ (Kasimir Malevich). These were seductive ideals especially when they were married to those of communism, equality, selflessness and working for the common good.
Rodchenko became more clinical, undertaking what he described as ‘laboratory work’, pairing things down further and rejecting the brush which was only good for figurative representational work for the ruling pen and the compass. It all makes perfect sense, getting rid of bourgeois sentiments and emotions and concentrating on the production of practical things. The roots of much of the more brutal machinations of graphic design and black & white movies are buried here.
Then it all got a bit conceptual when the team hitched up with Stepanova, Vesnin and Exter to put on an exhibition in Moscow in 1921 entitled ‘5 x 5 = 25’. Five artists exhibited five pieces each, as well as five covers for twenty five catalogues. But things soon got back on track when the duo reinvented themselves as experts on advertising to tackle some of shortcomings of the new communist system. The images they produced were immediate and forceful, using solid colours and montage photographic images under the banner of ‘heroic realism’. Hang on, I thought we had ditched realism?
From that point on it was fast forward for Rodchenko and Popova as they turned their hands to book, magazine and set design, not forgetting product design, packaging, fabrics and much more. As I said at the start, these two were in the right place at the right time and there is nothing wrong with opportunism, as my career has proved.
There were a huge number of pieces in the exhibition, and the curators, Margarita Tupitsyn and Vicente Todoli, have done an exceptional job in bringing it all together in such a comprehensive way. Despite what has gone before I do like some of the work; ‘The Female Journalist’ directed by Lev Kuleshov with sets by Rodchenko and also his poster for ‘Cine-Eye’, Popova’s fabric designs and especially her design for ‘Cup and Saucer’, best of all her embroidery design for the Verbovka co-operative. It is a pity that she died so young, otherwise I think she would have become extremely influential.
30 September, 2009
Identity: Eight rooms, nine lives
coming soon…