Anselm Kiefer

Of all the artists to provoke the term Neo-Expressionism, Anselm Kiefer is its most convincing exponent. Neo-expressionism placed European art in the vanguard for the first time since World War 2. Neo-expressionism was a reaction against abstraction and the cool boredom of minimalism. This form of expressionism developed in the 1960s and 1970s and arrived via several international exhibitions in the early eighties: Venice Biennale and Documenta 7, held in Kassell. Kiefer is the most central European of painters: “a poet in paint” that is thoroughly Teutonic and postmodern. Kiefer was taught by Beuys at the Düsseldorf academy. The evidence can be seen in his work which “still carries Beuys’ imprint in its materials- tar, straw, rusty iron and lead” (Hughes, 1991, p.407).

Resurrexit, 1973.

Varus, 1976.

Nürnberg –Weistpiel-Weise 1981

Kiefer’s subject is Germany’s past. The heavy weight of history is incredible. A Kiefer composition can draw upon Goethe’s Faust and the Old Testament’s Song of Solomon. Margarethe (1981) and Shulemith (1983) both make reference to the Old Testament and Paul Celan’s Death Fugue, a Holocaust memorial:



Paul Celan: Death Fugue

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink it and drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents
he writes he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave
he commands us strike up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you in the morning at noon we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined

He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot you others sing now and play
he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue
jab deeper you lot with your spades you others play on for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents
He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink
you death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air
He plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith

(N.B. some texts spell “Shulamith” as “Sulamith”; I am assuming that this is incorrect).

Margarete, 1981.

Shulamith, 1983

Margarete is the blonde personification of Aryan womanhood while Shulamith is the sybol of Jewish womanhood. For the painting Shulamith, Kiefer appropriated Wilhelm Kries’ Funeral Hall for Nazi war heroes, built in 1939 to create a blackened crypt: a Nazi monument becomes a Jewish one.

Aschenblume (AshFlower), 2004.

Kiefer has been posted here because of his mixed-media approach and his ability to fuse an all-overness design into his paintings similar to Pollock with a politically engaged message. Peter Schjeldahl wrote that Kiefer had “thoroughly assimilated and advanced the eshetic lessons of Jackson Pollock’s doubleness of special illusion and material literalness on a scale not just big, but exploded, enveloping, discomposed” (Wheeler, 1991 p.314).


Hughes, R., (1991) The Shock of the New, London: Thames and Hudson.
Wheeler, D., (1991) Art Since Mid Century New York and London: Thames and Hudson.

Malcolm LeGrice

Malcolm Le Grice's Berlin Horse /
Sound by Brian Eno

" Multi-projection film Berlin Horse (1970) was based entirely on a novel but simple idea of a repeating, subtly changing film loop. The soundtrack created by Brian Eno was also implemented using a tape loop. According to the director, Berlin Horse examines how the eye works and how the minds builds up a perceptual rhythmic structure" (From YouTube).

Philip Guston

Philip Guston is of interest here because he “took an individual stand somewhere between Romantico-Surrealist and veiled Social-Realist interests” (O’Hara, F., 1975, p.134). Some of Guston’s early work were “haunting reminders of Chirico” (O’Hara, F., 1975, p.134). You can see in the paintings like Mother and Child from 1930 and the Conspirators from 1932.

Mother and Child, 1930.



Conspirators 1932.

The range of influences on Guston’s work is breath taking: from Renaissance Art through to Neo-classicism and Picasso. Guston seemed to move towards expressionism especially from the nineteen forties. We see the influence of Beckman. Works like If this be not I we see the compression of influences: Peiro della Franscesca and Uccello, late Cubism. Porch No 2 is more heavily stylised. The next more was going to be towards abstraction. With the Tormentors we still could see the remains of “Guston’s old props” (Anfam, 1999 p. 140).

If this be not I 1945

Porch No 2 1947

Tormentors 1947-48

Review 1948-50

Review seems filled with the “fragile, shadowed memories of an earlier vocabulary” (Anfam, 1999 p. 140). Critics largely agree that “Guston approached radical abstraction with the greatest of difficultly, only arriving there for certain, after 1951” (Wheeler, 1991 p.58).

In the fifties we see Guston “resolve his divergent tendencies (Wheeler, 1991, p. 58) and “purified his paintings” (O’Hara, 1975 p. 136). The dialogues with de Chirico and Giavanni di Paola disappear – and we see the more abstract tendencies of the paintings of Cezanne and Tiepolo, Turner and Impressionism. Paintings like B.T.W and Zone are made up of shimmering painted strokes, horizontal and vertical dashes making up pluses and minuses: a Mondrian reinterpreted by Monet. The paintings of the fifties do resemble parts of Monet’s Waterlillies: The Irises 1916-23, although Frank O’Hara does say “not late Monet” (1975 p.136). This argument is also supported by Robert Hughes who sees a closer relationship between Guston's abstractions and Mondrian's seascapes he painted on the coast of Schveningen in 1912-15 (1997, p. 584).

B.T.W. 1951

Zone 1953-54

The works could be described as abstract-impressionism as all the forms are dissolved into light and atmosphere. These “optical ‘scenes’” might “be found in nature under exceptional circumstances of light, but which has nothing to do with the observation, analysis and recreation of nature’s own light-phenomena” (O’Hara, 1975 p.137). The works from the fifties into the sixties begin to show a broader range of expressions, gestures and modulations of colour.

The Clock 1956-57

In the sixties the tones darken and the imagery seems unresolved. In the late sixties during a period of political and social upheaval “unexpectedly”, David Anfam recalls “he (Guston) halted the palimpsest compositions which had grown greyed and more monumental by the early 1960s and instead wretched to the surface scenes that they had seemed to cloak” (Anfam, 1999, p.207). Guston in his explanation of “his departure from high-minded formalism… said simply ‘I got sick and tired of that purity. Wanted to tell stories’” (Wheeler, 1991 p.290). The New York Times critic Hilton Kramer called Guston “a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum” – he was wrong. Guston brought into his paintings his earlier anti-fascist concerns, fusing it with the language of comics and cartoons. This time the Klansmen are bumbling, bullying buffoons of the Nixon years.

Close-up III 1961

City Limits 1969

Daniel Wheeler explains the reasons for this strategy by reminding us that “just as the Baroque had unfolded in the shadow of the High Renaissance, late modernism as a whole, as well as post-minimalism in specific, found itself struggling with the after effects of a glorious past, a modernist past whose revolutions had produced not Utopia, but instead a society shot through with grotesque incongruities, political, economic and aesthetic” (Wheeler, 1991, p.290). Guston’s response was to reclaim the art of his idealistic past and produce once again a humanist art.

The Studio 1969

Why add Guston to this blog anyway? Well, mainly because of his struggle as an artist and the need to recognise the unresolved struggle between the idealistic, the political and a convincing aesthetic that is fully resolved and sustainable.

Sources:

Anfam, D., (1999) Abstract Expressionism New York and London: Thames and Hudson
Hughes, R., (1997) American Visions The Epic History of Art in America London: Harvill Press
O’Hara, F., (1975) Art Chronicles 1954-1966, New York: A Venture Book, George Braziller Inc.
Wheeler, D., (1991) Art Since Mid Century New York and London: Thames and Hudson.

Robert Motherwell

Motherwell was perhaps the youngest of the Abstract Expressionists; he was also their intellectual light, the most educated member of the group, the best travelled and most independent and the artist who was the most connected to the old European avant-garde. He immersed himself in modernist tradition. He especially loved French culture: I imaged that he smoked Gauloises (he did not, he liked the blue label and used it in his collages); he loved French literature: Mallarme, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Proust and Baudelaire. His contact with surrealism was very important because it prompted Motherwell to paint and involve himself in developing his own for of automatic drawing and painting exercises, firstly with the artist Matta and then with Jackson Pollock.

Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 34 1953-54.

Although an abstract painter, Motherwell’s work “constantly reaches out into life”: his Elegies
working as “general metaphors of the contrast between life and death and their interrelation" (Lynton, N., 2003 p. 243).

Iberia No. 18, 1958

In Plato's Cave No. 1 1972

Many of Motherwell's paintings rely on oppositions. He uses "the polarity between amphousness and geometry" to evoke "both opposition and ultimate harmony, as between nature and culture, emptiness thought, passivity and action- and on a larger scale, between chaos and cosmos" (Flam, J., 1991, p. 26-27). Paintings like Plato's Cave "seem to set emptiness against the mark of man (sic) in a way that recalls the oldest paintings known, those on the walls of prehistoric caves, especially the mysterious and moving pictographs on the walls of Lascaux and Altmira" (Flam, J., 1991, p. 27).

Summer Open with Mediterranean Blue 1974

Paintings like Summer Open are a manifestation of Motherwell's engagement with Matisse and matisse at his most sensual. The blue seems to reflect the light of Collioure, but a Collioure that this now a lost paradise, part of a Mediterranean culture that has vanished. Is it a nostalgic longing that we see in some of Motherwell's pieces?

Sources:

Flam, J., (1991) Motherwell, London and New York: Phaidon

Lynton, N., (2003) The Story of Modern Art, London and New York: Phaidon.

William Henry Fox Talbot

Photogenic drawing. C. 1835

Two delicate plant fronds Photogenic drawing negative, likely 1839.

Wrack: From the "Bertoloni Album," 1839 Photogenic drawing

Wild Fennel, 1841–42

Pattern of seeds of dandelion? or milkweed? Photographic engraving, mid 1850s.

Ad Reinhardt

"An avant-garde in art advances art-as-art or it isn't avant-garde" (Ad Reinhardt).

Ad Reinhardt’s aims as a maker of images seems rather removed from my attachment to what could be called the romantic or spiritual in visual culture.




Reinhardt’s art “moved from geometrical abstraction through a controlled and markedly impersonal form of Abstract Expressionism into a uniquely concentrated and super elegant geometrical abstraction. From 1960 until his death in 1967 he painted nothing but square canvases of one size in which two barely distinguishable coats of black present a cruciform trisection of the surface” (Lynton, N., 2003, p.244).

Abstract Painting No. 5 1962

In 1960 Reinhardt explains his aims as a painter: "Nowhere in world art has it been clearer than in Asia that anything irrational, momentary, spontaneous, unconscious, primitive, expressionist, accidental or informal, cannot be called serious art. Only blankness, complete awareness, disinterestedness; the ‘artist as artist’ only, of one and rational mind, ‘vacant and spiritual’, empty and marvellous; in symmetries and regularities only; the changeless ‘human content’, the timeless ‘supreme principle’, the ageless ‘universal formula for art, nothing else" (Lynton, N., 2003 p.244).




Ad Reinhardt in his essay “Art as Art” argued against art-as-expression or art-as-apocalypse. “Art”, he argued “needs no justification with ‘realism’ or ‘naturalism,’ ‘regionalism’ or ‘nationalism,’ individualism’ or ‘socialism,’ or any other ideas” (Reinhardt, A., 1992 p.806). “The one standard in art”, he suggests “is oneness and fineness, rightness and purity, abstractness and evanescence. The one thing to say about art is its breathlessness, lifelessness, deathlessness, contentlessness, formlessness, spacelessness and timelessness. This is always the end of art” (Reinhardt, A., 1992 p.806).


Sources:

Harrison, C. and Wood, P., (1992) Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwells.

Lynton, N., (2003) The Story of Modern Art, London and New York: Phaidon

Reinhardt, Ad (1962) "Art as Art" in Harrison, C. and Wood, P., (1992) Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwells, pp.806-809.

Daro Montag

Dr Daro Montag is a lecturer from University Collage, Falmouth that now incorporates the Dartington College of Arts. According to University College's website he makes art out of living matter. His wok is produced with the assistance of micro organisms. The results are these incredible abstractions.

''Radiance III' 1994
Ilfachrome print from 35mm slide

''Radiance IV' 1994
Ilfachrome print from 35mm slide

''Yew II' 1996
Ilfachrome print from 35mm slide

'Lower Treculliacks - Mud' 2000
Unique Ilfochrome print. Film, mud, microbes
95cm x 76cm

This Earth (detail), 2006, digital print on
paper, 24" x 24,"

This Earth 1 (detail), 2006, digital print on
paper, 24" x 24,"

This Earth 6 (detail), 2006, digital print on
paper, 24" x 24,"

"Bioglyphs: generating images in collaboration with nature's events". PhD, University of Hertfordshire, 2000: http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/resdegs/model/main0.htm

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg Untitled (Glossy Black Painting), ca. 1951; painting; oil and paper on canvas.

The painting featured above is very similar to the pieces that I have been producing. However the aims of Rauschenberg's approach or at least some of the the results may be different. These early fifties pieces have influenced the making of the backgrounds to may digital imagery.

Retroactive I 1964

Kite 1963

The above pictures Kite 1963 and Retroactive I 1964 are Rauschenberg's view of the landscape of media. He essentially deals with glut: mass communication, mass media, and the noise of radio, cinema and television: the city full of signs: billboards, electronic data streams and the world of traffic and congestion. The idea of glut in the 1960s and in the 1980s seems miniscule in comparison with the glut of the net and the multi channels available to us: Google, MySpace, Facebook, Freeview, Sky, Virgin Media and whatever else exists.

What is interesting about these two works is that they seem to excavate the whole histories of media. Robert Hughes (1980 & 1991, pp. 345-6) has suggested that Retroactive showed how Rauschenberg like to excavate histories within a single image. The “red patch in the bottom right corner… is a silkscreen enlargement of a photo by Gjon Mili”, which Rauschenberg found in life magazine. According to Hughes Mili’s photograph was a carefully set-up parody of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912. “Duchamp’s painting was in turn based on Marey’s photos of a moving body. So…” according to Hughes “the image goes back through seventy years of technological time, through allusion after allusion; and a further irony is that, in its Rauschenbergian form, it ends up looking precisely like the figures of Adam and Eve expelled from Eden in Masaccio’s fresco for Carmine in Florence” (Hughes p. 346).



Above: Masaccio’s fresco from The Brancacci Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence

Hughes, R. (1991) The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change London: Thames and Hudson.

Chrystel Lebas

Between Dog and Wolf (2006)
This is a amazing monograph by Chystel Lebas. Here are some extracts:

'We do not have to have to be long in the woods to experience the always rather anxious impression of "going deeper and deeper" into a limitless world. Soon, if we do not know where we are going we no longer know where we are.'
Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of space. translated from the French by Maria Jolas. Boston Beacon Press p.185.

'Forests, especially, with the mystery of their space prolonged indefinitely beyond the veil of tree-trunks and leaves, space is veiled for our eyes, but transparent to action, are inevitable psychological transcendents'
Marcault & Therese Brose. Le Education de demain Paris Alcan 20th edition, 1939. p.255

'The forest is a fascinating place; one can feel attracted to its grandeur, or scared by its depth and darkness. This space of immensity echoes our childhood memories, through fairytale or play. Walking through the forest of my childhood in France, after many years, I remembered when we used to build a hut, and slowly the light would disappear, and darkness would surround us.' Chrystel Lebas (2006 p. 93)

Roy Amiss

I came across these images purely by accident in autumn 2009. I had never heard of Roy Amiss before this point and so it was a shock to see art similar to my own stripe pictures that I had produced from 1995-1997. Works like Spectre of Love have a charge to it that I hope comes close to matching that of Amiss’ optical paintings impact. Amiss is far better equipped to be an artist and a thinker than I and has developed his stripe painting beyond my own capabilities.

This is from the artist’s statement from the Saatchi Gallery website: “Great influences on me have been the ideas of surrealism, philosophy and science - the latter playing an increasing role in my late work. In terms of people, I would cite: the celebrated British philosophers David Hume and Alfred North Whitehead and the artists Dali, Raphael and Da Vinci. I have a great passion for experimentation and use a great variety of materials such as: oil paint, acrylic, pencil, ink, watercolour, chalk, wood, glass, net or vitrage, agar, and chemicals. These materials I have employed in paintings, drawings and objects. Similarly, the techniques I have developed are also diverse: old master glazing and drawing techniques; collage and photo-transfers; the exploitation of optical properties of various materials: automatism, accident and chance; frottage (Ernst) and the paranoiac critical method (Dali): the culturing of bacteria; the application of mathematics” (Amiss, Saatchi 2003-10).

Amiss also cites Ernst and his Frottage technique as an influence and adopts similar approaches to image making.

Atomic Whitehead 1998

Disjunctive David Bowie Clones 1999





Striped Madonna 2000




Quantum miles Davis 2001

Robert De Niro 2004

Leonardo di Capprio 2004

Drew Barrymore 2004

Muybridge to Infinity 2005

The man with no name 2005

Storm in a Teacup 2006




Roy Amiss at the Saatchi Gallery: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/Roy+Amiss/17298.html