'Photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. So shouldn't painters profit from their newly acquired liberty to do other things?' Pablo Picasso.
Capturing the Moment, at Tate Modern.
A wonderful exhibition, one of the best I have seen in a long time - so many of my favourite artists' work together in one space: Gerhard Richter, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Paula Rego, Dorothea Lange, Pauline Boty, just to name a few. And some new ones too: Sugimoto's photographs were a real revelation and he is an artist I want to explore further.
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'The painter constructs, the photographer discloses'. Susan Sontag.
Throughout the 20th century, the idea that painting accurately mirrors the world was complicated by artists' use of photography. Lens-based media could offer a much more convincing representation of reality than painted canvas. Painters developed new styles and perspectives in response to this challenge, particularly when exploring the human figure.
Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon use the human form to expose the visceral reality of the self. Whereas Freud preferred to paint from real life, Bacon draws from photographic material. He violently distorts the human figure to reveal what he called 'the pulsations of a person'. Pablo Picasso had also challenged notions of painterly representation and linear perspective to develop a style known as cubism. In these portraits he collapses multiple perspectives into one single moment in time.
This painting shows Kitty Garman, Freud's first wife. Although it is hard to tell from the painting, Garman is pregnant with their second child. The setting, the dog's pose and the way her robe appears to have slipped off her shoulder, give this image an intimate feel. This contrasts with the anonymous title of the work, and Garman's blank expression. Freud is known for depicting his sitters - often friends and lovers - in a way that suggests intimacy but often feels uncomfortable for the viewer.
Lucian Freud, Boy Smoking, 1950-51, (oil on copper)
The close-up face of a young man fills the canvas. Freud created intense and unsettling portraits like this one by sitting uncomfortably near his subjects while painting, in sessions that sometimes lasted up to eight hours. The oversized facial features are typical of German new objectivity, an art movement of the 1920s and 30s which sought 'unsentimental' depictions of reality.
'My object in painting pictures is to try and move the senses by giving an intensification of reality'.
Lucian Freud, The Painter's Mother IV, 1973, (oil on canvas)
Lange took this photograph in the 1930s while working for a US government agency called the Resettlement Administration (RA). The RA wanted to demonstrate the hardship suffered by impoverished white US farm workers to raise public support for their work and the policies of Roosevelt's administration. This led to practices such as naming photographs after the 'type' of person featured in them, rather than the individual sitter. Migrant Mother is a very famous example and was soon reproduced in newspapers across the country as the defining photograph of the US Great Depression.
When the sitter Florence Owens Thompson was later identified in 1978, she stated: 'I wish she hadn't taken my picture... [Lange] did not ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the pictures. She said she'd send me a copy. She never did'. Looking at the portrait today allows us to question the ethics of photographic representation, and what happens when an individual is made to stand in for a multitude.
Pablo Picasso, Le Marin, 1943, (oil on canvas)
This work shows the artistic dialogue between Bacon and Freud. While their visual styles differed, both were interested in the human figure and sat for each other. 'What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance', Bacon said. His portraits powerfully convey the complexities of the human psyche.
Alice Neel, Puerto RIcan Boys on 108th Street, 1955, (oil on canvas)
Neel's interest in representations of masculinity is reflected in this portrait of two boys posing confidently in the street. Their identical stances suggest both the assertiveness of adults and the vulnerability of children.
'I paint my time using the people as evidence'.
The model for this portrait is photographer and artist Dora Maar. She is known for her surrealist montages, street photography and later for her painting. She was commissioned by an art journal to document the progress of Picasso's anti-war painting Guernica. She observed the work was 'like an immense photograph... absolutely modern'. Photography influenced Picasso in multiple ways, from documenting life and his artworks, to more experimental techniques, some taught to him by Maar.
2. Tensions:
While photographers grapple with the mechanics of the camera, painters continue to work with the surface of the canvas and the texture of paint. They often want to explore the material ppossibilities of the medium as well as the painted image itself. Layered compositions are being created which privilege abstract sensations over depictions of reality.
Breaking down the human figure, Cecily Brown asks questions about how paint can convey the essence of bodies or figures. Can the texture of paint itself transmit the rawness and vibrancy of human flesh? Can painted images, As Bacon, Marwan and Condo suggest, embody the multiple, fractured facets of the mind? Turning the canvas upside down and upsetting the visual order, Baselitz asks that we come closer, not at the figures but at the painted surface itself. Material, expressive painting such as this resists the precision of the mechanical eye and a world increasingly filled with photographic imagery.
Marwan left Syria in 1957 to study painting in Berlin, shortly before the Berlin Wall was erected and the city divided. In Germany he came across a range of new approaches to abstract painting, characterised by melancholy and anguish. Marwan's paintings from this period generally feature human figures on stark, single-colour backgrounds, which highlights the intense rendering of his characters. This painting depicts the head of Bader Chaker as Sayyab, a politically engaged Iraqi poet. He died tragically young, but his contribution to modern Arabic literature is widely acknowledged.
'I think utterly existentially ... a painting is like a wound'.
Georg Baselitz, Orangenesser II, 1981, (oil on canvas)
Baselitz began to paint figures upside-down in the late 1960s, insisting that viewers should concentrate on the lines and marks of the painting rather than its resemblance to reality. This work is part of a series he made in the early 1980s that depict 'orange eaters' alluding to the Biblical figure of Adam eating the forbidden fruit. The psychologically charged subject matter is understood by Baselitz's visceral painterly technique and aggressive colour scheme, which he described as 'boxing with both hands'.
War is based on a newspaper photograph of Iraqi civilians in the aftermath of a bomb explosion during the Iraq war. Rego was shaken by the image of a mother carrying a baby, seemingly frozen in fear, and a girl screaming next to them. Here, she gives the figures mask-like rabbit heads. A disfigured children's toy on the ground makes the horror more intense. As in Rego's other work, the figures reference the subversive and psychological troubling traditions of folk and fairy tales which explore themes of violence and sexuality.
'When you draw you can push your pencil or your pastel - everything is much more violent. Painting is much more lyrical. That's why I took up pastel and haven't given it up'.
looking closer
George Condo, Mental States, 2000, (oil on canvas)
The work reflects Condo's interest in how inner mental states can be expressed through outward appearances. Images of the same woman's face are repeated across the canvas, simultaneously portraying a range of mental states, from euphoria to rage and despair. Condo grapples with the complexity of human psychology, offering a composite image that is fragmented and disturbed. Incorporating a wide range of sources, from cartoons and popular culture to abstract expressionism, the painting articulates mood and emotion in a way that is both comic and powerful.
'I describe what I do as psychological Cubism. Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states'.
Cecily Brown, Trouble in Paradise, 1999, (oil on canvas)
Trouble in Paradise hovers between representation and abstraction. Set against a dramatic black background, ribbons and swirls of warm colour cover almost the entire surface of the painting. At the same time, we can discern fragmented bodies expressed in bold painterly gestures, conveying a depiction of sexuality through paint. 'The place I am interested in is where the mind goes wehn it's trying to make up for what isn't there'.
Francis Bacon, Study for a Pope VI, 1961, (oil on canvas)
Photography as Painting:
Some artists have manipulated their photographs in different ways to explore the constructed nature of image-making. They question what is a truthful representation of reality. Can an image convey the whole picture? The way we present and arrange pictures determines what we perceive and how we experience them. They invite us to consider the act of looking: at images, at ourselves and at the world. In Struth's photographs visitors gaze at paintings that, in turn, look at us.
Andreas Gursky, 1955, El Ejido, 2017, (photograph, inkjet print on paper)
In this work Gursky portrays a desolate sea of plastic and litter around the town of El Ejido, in Almeria, Spain. More than 30,000 hectares of land in the area are covered with plastic to cultivate intensively farmed crops. Gursky's photograph offers a monumental view of the effects of global capitalism, industrial farming and environmental pollution.
Hiroshi Sugimoto:
Sugimoto's Seascapes capture the infinite: a universal image of the sea that has been encountered throughout generations. The series comprises 220 black and white photographs, developed over 300 years in different locations across the world. Somewhere between representation and abstraction, the works depict expansive views of the ocean against cloudless skies. They are punctured by a horizon line that dissects the compositions in half and delineates the limits of visual and mental perception.
The Seascapes convey the passing of time. Sugimoto refers to these works as 'time exposed' alluding to his technique of long exposure, where light gradually burns into the prints to produce an image. Unfolding endlessly beyond the horizon, Sugimoto's oceans position humanity in stark contrast to the vastness and persistence of nature. They ask us to reflect on the urgent need to protect our rapidly decaying planet, in Sugimoto's words, 'to think before destroying ourselves'.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, 1948, Aegean Sea, Pilion, 1990, (photograph, black and white, on paper)
Capturing History:
In this section artists Gerhard Richter and Wilhelm Sasnal engage with history, media and memory by making paintings which are copies of photographs. In the act of translation from photographic media to painted canvas, harmonies and contradictions emerge between the mediums. We tend to think of photographs as objective images, presenting an unbiased view of history. But does the clarity of the photographic lens obscure and distort as much as it reveals?
Richter grew up in post-war East Germany and his photo-paintings are often concerned with histories of conflict, blending personal experience with this wider context. His landscapes are painted from photographs which Richter takes himself. They relate to 19th century German romantic painters, who saw themselves as mediators between divine nature and painted art. Richter takes the concept of mediation a step further, by painting a moment that has already been captured. This idea of artifice is also present in Two Candles, which adopts the still-life tradition of memento mori - a reminder of death. The fleeting light of the candles is fixed forever as a painted image.
The photographs Sasnal paints from are taken from magazines, the Internet, and the ephemera of everyday life. Like Richter, he is interested in how painting can give photographic media a physical presence which somehow transforms the original subject.
Aunt Marianne was painted in 1965 from an everyday family shapshot, as part of a larger series of black and white photo-paintings. It shows a four-month-old Richter with his young maternal aunt, who was later murdered by the Nazi eugenics programme in Dresden during WWII. The work has a hazy, smudged look, like a blurred frame from a film reel. By highlighting this photographic quality in paint Richter reminds us that the image may not be faithful - it is a copy of a copy. We are challenged to question whether images can ever capture objective truth.
Barn was painted from a photograph taken near the Bavarian forest in Germany. It shows a small outpost of fabricated structures set against rolling green hills. The treeline stretches back, marking the horizon. As a study of the natural landscape, the work continues a tradition practiced by German romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich. But while Friedrich was concerned with depicting the sublime power of nature, Richter is more interested in if a painting of a photograph can maintain an 'accurate' representation of reality.
Gerhard Richter, Zwei Kerzen, 1982, (oil on canvas)
In Two Candles, Richter plays with the ambiguities of the painted image. Two lit candles seem to stand beside each other, framed by the dark shadow and white backdrop of their surroundings. Or perhaps only a single candle is shown, reflected back to itself in a mirror. The forms are slightly blurred, as if in a photographic haze. The frozen candle flame, representing a life that must one day end, is a common motif across the history of European painting. By returning to familiar symbols and painting directly from photographs, Richter is trying to erase any personal painterly style from his work.
Convergence:
In the 1950s and 60s artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Pauline Boty and Richard Hamilton experimented with the medium of painting. They incorporated screnprinting and photographic sources from popular culture, mass media and advertising into their work. This approach of fusing popular imagery and mechanical processes with high art was embraced by artists around the globe and became known as 'pop' art.
Artists used screenprinting techniques to appropriate, enlarge and multiply photographic material. A mechanical process that subverted concepts of uniqueness and painterly genius, screenprinting mimicked the influx of images and information in an increasingly mediated world. Pop art works refeer to other images - Boty, for instance, painted Portrait of Derek Marlowe with Unknown Ladies in response to photographic or cinama tic footage of Marlow and Marilyn Monroe.
In works displayed in this section, Warhol, Boty and Hamilton capture their world and environment, explore the cult of personality and investigate the sexual politics of popular visual culture. Boty exposes the objectification of women; Warhol and Hamilton the constructed and performative nature of masculinity. By multiplying and enlarging the visual noise of modern life, these works expose the complex relationship between image and self.
Boty used imagery from popular culture to question how gender roles were presented in the media. This work contrasts the treatment of an individual male sitter with the decorative depiction of unnamed women. Derek Marlow, an English writer and painter, appears cool and assertive, in a pose common in celebrity photographs of the time. The smudged faces of four anonymous women are cut off the at forehead and chin. Boty said that for most men, women were 'kind of things'.
Robert Rauschenberg, Almanac, 1962, (oil, acrylic paint and screenprint on canvas)
Rauschenberg began making silkscreen paintings in 1962. He would screen-print images from books and magazines, along with his own photographs, onto the canvas, then apply painterly brushstrokes. His intention was 'to escape the familiarity of objects and collage'.
Almanac is part of a group of similar works made in black and white. The images within the work are organised in a loose, poetic manner, creating an impression of visual flux that allows the viewer to free-associate.
This work alludes to the 'space race' between the US and the USSR. John F. Kennedy appears in an unpainted astronaut's helmet. Hamilton's investigation of the languages of advertising and popular culture through painting and collage have a critical and analytical intention as much as a poeticfeeling. He understood that 'the artist in 20th century urban life is inevitably a consumer of mass culture and potentially a contributor to it'.
David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972, (acrylic on canvas)
This painting captures Hockney's then boyfriend, artist Peter Schlesinger, looking down at Hockney's assistant, John St Clair, swimming underwater. Hockney was fascinated with depictions of water, glass and transparency, and with the the contrast between flatness and depth, fluidity and stillness. From 1968 to 1977, Hockney worked on a sequence of large double portraits of friends and acquaintances in enclosed setting, capturing their intimate and often complex relationships.
This work is based on a multiple exposure photograph of the artist as a child. Katz superimposed the images five times across the canvas, giving her painting an impermanence more often associated with photography. The figure aludes to the small child in a red coat from the film Don't Look Now, as well as the folk tale character Red Riding Hood. Presenting multiple selves and perspectives, the work operates in the slippage between the personal and the imagined.
Lisa Brice, Untitled, 2019, (gouache and tempera on canvas)
Peter Doig, Canoe Lake, 1997-8, (oil on canvas)
Canoe Lake is based on a still photograph Doig took from the horror film Friday the 13th. He has made several paintings that refer to the film. Always using photographic images as a compositional starting point, Doig's paintings often have a strong sense of atmosphere or hidden presence. There is a tension between the potential for sublime beauty and the horror of death, decay and obliteration.
Canoe Lake is based on a still photograph Doig took from the horror film Friday the 13th. He has made several paintings that refer to the film. Always using photographic images as a compositional starting point, Doig's paintings often have a strong sense of atmosphere or hidden presence. There is a tension between the potential for sublime beauty and the horror of death, decay and obliteration.
Marlene Dumas, 1953, Lucy, 2004, (oil on canvas)
Dumas portrays the figure in this work in an ambiguous state of sleep, death or sexual ecstasy. The artist bases most of her paintings on photographs from magazines and newspapers, or Polaroids she has taken herself. Lucy refers to a detail from Italian artist Caravaggio's 1608 painting Burial of St Lucy. According to legend, the saint was brutally tortured, blinded and finally stabbed in the throat. Dumas has reworked the painting in a style that suggests the flatness of a morgue photograph. She is interested in the language, techniques and ethics of representation, exploring our desire to look and visually consume.
Marlene Dumas, Stern, 2004, (oil on canvas)
Ulrike Meinhof, a member of the West German far-left militant organisation Red Army Faction, is shown with eyes closed and mouth open in an anmiguous pose. Found dead in her prison cell in May 1976, she appeared to have taken her own life, although some claim she was murdered. The title acknowledges the source of the image: a photograph printed in the German magazine Stern. Dumas reinterpreted an image previously used by German artist Gerhard Richter, who made paintings based on the same photograph in 1988.
Luc Tuymans, 1958, The Shore, 2014, (oil on canvas)
Tuymans based The Shore on the opening images of a 1968 film, A Twist of Sand. The film depicts a group of men on the seashore, illuminated by a light source, out of shot. They are waving towards it, in expectation of rescue, but very shortly afterwards they are gunned down. Tuymans often transforms photographic and cinematic source materials into paintings characterised by visible brushwork. Most of his paintings are completed in a single day. This work is also one of several Tuymans has created based on places associated with violence and death.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Predecessors, 2013
Akunyili Crosby creates her multi-layered work from family photographs and personal memorabilia mixed with cut-outs from Nigerian popular magazines and newspapers. These disparate items reveal the multiple sources of influence on people's experiences in our contemporary multi-cultural world. The female figure is the artist's alter ego, a modern African woman who embodies a cosmopolitan African lifestyle. Akunyili Crosby refers to her as an 'Afropolitan', representative of a new generation of Africans who exist between multiple geographies and cultures, living a trans-cultural and trans-national life.
The Promised Land reflects on political demonstrations that followed the 2017 generarl election in Kenya. At least 45 people died disputing the election outcome. The painting draws together media narratives with Armitage's own views on contemporary Kenya. On the left, the banner held by a protester references the nude in European art history, connecting political ideas with aesthetic taste. On the right, people's bodies are transformed by encroaching tear gas. The work is painted on Lubugo, a bark cloth, which is culturallly significant for the Baganda people in Uganda, traditionally used as a burial shroud.
In this work Warhold disrupts the myth of authenticity in self-portraiture. Warhol's trademark silkscreen process allowed him to create an image that embodies his mantra of superficiality, doubling as both pattern and depiction of a person. Warhol was interested in celebrity, moving in circles of the rich and famous. He understood how to extend and exaggerate his image, identity and cultural persona. Despite its repetition across four canvases, the self-portrait reveals nothing of the artist, perpetuating the mysterious facade he portrayed to the public.
Towards the Digital:
Artists in this section are grappling with the visual and emotional possibilities of painting in the digital age, and how the medium can respond to our contemporary reality. They assimilate history and its relationship to images to offer new ways of understanding the present. New media, the internet and archival material collide with the tradition of Western painting to create timely pictorial languages.
Christinas Quarles, Casually Cruel, 2018, (acrylic on canvas)
Quarles began this work by transforming random marks into stretched human figures. The background derives from a digital sketch. Visible brushstrokes and paint drips contrast with the blue and green wall, drawing attention to the act of painting as a gestural and material process. Casually Cruel was painted in 2018, while the US government was separating families at the US/Mexico border under Trump's policy of 'zero tolerance'. The artist painted the work listening to the news, thinking of 'how seemingly casual and careless the government was about something that had such significant psychological implications'.
Salman Toor, 9PM, the News, 2015, (oil on canvas)
Lorna Simpson, Then & Now, 2016, (12 panels, ink and screenprint on clayboard)
A family gather around the dining table. The patriarchal figure smokes a cigarette at the head of the table. His son sits naked, vulnerable to external influences like media and religion represented by a TV screen showing the news and comic book-style speech bubles. Behind them is a servant and a mosque. Toor has said the anonymous figures in the background are 'ghosts' of his Pakistani culture, 'a past that is both disrupter and enabler'.
Then and Now was made by screenprinting found photographic imagery onto clayboard panels, with black ink added by hand.The work apropriates an iconic photograph taken during clashes between black residents and police in Detroir in 1967. The title suggests a dialogue betwen past and present, connecting the events of 1967 to the present where police brutality and disproportionate violence towards black citizens continues. Masking the photographic imagery beneath, the black ink dramatises the violence of the event, while the fragmentation of the images mirrors the complexity of the narrative being represented.
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