From Monet to Warhol - 5: Surrealism, Pop Art

From Monet to Warhol - 5: Surrealism, Pop Art

at the Goulandris Foundation, Athens.

This is the last post on this exhibition. If you want to see the previous posts, you can go here for Impressionism, here for Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, here for Japonisme and Nabis, and here for the Unclassifiables. If you do not wish to read the introduction to this post again, move down to the Surrealism section.

A wonderful exhibition, which gave me great pleasure. Firstly because it was great seeing paintings that I had seen before and loved. Secondly because some of it was new to me, and this includes artists I had not come across before, artists like Maurice Denis whose work was such a pleasant surprise.

The ensemble of eighty three works of forty five artists, mostly paintings,  which is on loan from the Swiss private collection, was assembled over three generations, affording us the opportunity to retrace the history of modern art from the 1880s until the present day.

Most of the major movements, currents and trends that have marked the evolution of painting are touched upon here in varying degrees of detail: Impressionism, Symbolism, Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Japonisme, Synthetism, the Nabis, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. They reflect the increasing changes imposed on perspective, colour and figuration, as well as the historical context in which they were conceived.

Surrealism:

In 1924 a group of young European artists and intellectuals gathered in Paris and decided to create a new artistic movement. Under the aegis of Andre Breton who drew up their founding manifesto, it expressed their refusal to allow logic a central role in the course of their lives that must henceforth be ruled by the power of imagination or chance. The term Surrealism, first pronounced a few years before by Guillaume Apollinaire, was chosen to designate their line of thinking. 

Breton organised and managed this movement with an iron hand, and it would reach its summit in the 1920s and 1930s, expanding internationally. However, the increasing disagreements within the group led its members, notably Max Ernst, Man Ray and Rene Magritte, to take their own separate paths.

Max Ernst, Yellow Seashell, 1928, (oil with graphite on paper on canvas)

Rene Magritte, The House, 1947, (gouache on paper on cardboard)

Man Ray, The Wall, 1938, (oil on canvas)

Domesticated Egg, 1944

Domesticated Egg is part of an ensemble of 37 works - readymades, drawings and photographs - that Man Ray assembled under the title Objects of My Affection. Through this selection the artist confirmed that he had not lost his colourful sense of humour and reclaimed his lotyalty to the Dada spirit of his beginnings.

Pop Art:

At the end of the 1950s in New York, as well as in London and Paris, young artists wanted to put an end to the supremacy of Abstraction by reintegrating in a thundering way, figuration and the everyday life into their work. This collective effort was dubbed Nouveau Realisme in France, and Pop Art in the USA and met with resounding success.

Not one of the painters affiliated with this movement acknowledged belonging to a group. Nevertheless, the points in common that connect works of Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselman, without mentioning Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg, make them the representatives of a new art. 

Andy Warhol, Man Ray, 1974, (screeprint in colours on wove paper)

Man Ray was for Andy Warhol both a model and a source of inspiration. Warhol created six portraits of Man Ray along with an edition of 100 silk-screen prints.

Tom Wesselmann, Mouth Study for Minneapolis Catalogue Cover, 1968, (oil on canvas)

Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke, 1965, (porcelain enamel on steel)

Roy Lichtenstein, Yellow and Black Brushstroke, 1970, (marker, coloured pencil and graphite on paper)

Roy Lichtenstein, Water Lily Pond with Reflections, 1992, (screeprinted enamel in colours on processed and swirled stainless steel).

From 1968 Lichtenstein began drawing inspiration from the works of Claude Monet. First, he concentrated on his Haystacks, then his Rouen Cathedrals, and finally his Water Lilies that he associated with his own earlier series Reflections.

Roy Lichtenstein, Portrait Triptych, 1974, (left and central sheets: coloured pencil and graphite on paper. Right sheet: coloured pencil and paper collage on paper)

The Essence of Anonymity, Yannis Gaitis - 2

The Essence of Annonymity by Yannis Gaitis

at the Theocharakis Foundation.

This is the second post on this exhibition - you can see the first one here .

In this second post I am including the introduction from the first post, plus more on the work that Gaitis is most famous for.

 

Born in 1923, Gaitis studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts and in 1949 he participated with Alekos Kontopoulos and other artists who had turned to abstract art, in the founding of the group The Extremists, a group which was opposed to academic art.  In 1954 he went to Paris where he completed his studies. He started by painting portraits and then moved on to work that was influenced by Surrealism and Picasso. He quickly moved on to abstract expressionism and surrealist compositions, then cubist and geometric paintings and sculptures. During this stage of his work we detect the first traces of pop art's influence.

From the middle Sixties he began to make his Little People: blank-faced, uniform, anonymous, homogeneous, interchangeable.  As the colonels in Greece staged their coup and set up a dictaroship, the expressionistic human profile with the hat appears in his paintings, the motif he is going to simplity and geometricalise turning it into a trade-mark of his work. This alienation in modern society was the main focus of his artistic career, the dominant and distinctive feature in his work. His style is established as pop-art. The formalistic repetition marks the painting of Gaitis from then on and up to his death. At the same petiod he paints the 'Assassination of Freedom', in which a series of soldiers shoot a pigeon.

This second post on Yannis Gaitis' work consists of the work he is most famous for, his hundreds of protagonists who we sometimes encounter on the surface of a canvas and sometimes they come out of it. They are his Little People - men without an identity usually wearing a wide-brimmed hat and carrying a briefcase. Expressionsless and stereotypical figures, always lined up in groups, usually in plaid or stripped suits 

It is no coincidence that Gaitis pleaced these Little People outside, in the streets, allowing direct contact with the public, such as the encounter that occurred during his 1975 exhibition at the City Hall of Kokkinia (a working class area) where the stylised figures, along with countless colourful flags, decorated the street and the square in front of the City Hall. There, his work entered everyday life, leaving the spaces of museums.

This is Gaitis' own interpretation of pop art and his own answers to the great questions of our time. His Little People also travel to the distant past, to our ancient past, asking us to identify their ontological presence within history.

Untitled, 1968, (oil on canvas)

The Old and the Young, 1968, (oil on canvas)

Monoplane, 1968, (oil on canvas)

In the Yard of Miracles, 1966, (oil on canvas)

Human Landscape, or Contrasts, 1977, (oil on canvas)

Exhibition or Street Spectators, 1974-75, (oil on canvas)

Litany or The Red and the Black, 1977, (oil on canvas and painted wood)

looking closer at the sculpted part

The Bird, (painted wood)

looking at the sculpted part

and again

Odysseus and the Sirens, 1979-1980, (oil on canvas)

Oh! Gods, (or Symplegades), 1980, (oil on canvas)

Delos, 1979-80, (oil on canvas)

Monument and Angel, 1979-80, (oil on canvas)

Hommage to Delos, 1979-80, (oil on canvas)

You and Us, (or The Parade) 1977, (oil on canvas)

Multiple Boxes, 1971, (oil on canvas)

The sculptures in the middle of the exhibition space

Personal Transportation, 1978-79, ( painted wood and metal)

Five to Six, 1970, (painted wood)

Untitled, (painted wood)

detail

Pop!

Pop! British and American Art, 1960-1975

at the Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry.

Seeing the Pauline Boty was the main reason why I went to see this exhibition. Even though there were some other works that I enjoyed, seeing this exhibition made me realise that there is a lot of Pop Art that leaves me cold. What follows is some of the images that I liked.

Allen Jones, Thind Big Bus, 1962

Pauline Boty, Colour Her Gone, 1962, (oil on hardboard)

The serenity of this panting contrasts with the de-personalised portraits of Monroe by Andy Warhol.

Boty was a stellar figure of the London art scene in the 1060s; a visual artist who also acted on stage and screen and who associated with the leading lights of a new generation of artists, many of whom went on to become household names. She was also a political radical and had a prophetic grasp of gender politics. A critique of the workings of mass culture and of gender inequality runs throughout her work. Like many of the women of Pop, Boty was marginalised, if not excluded from the mainstream of the histories of Pop Art.

You can see more of Boty's work here

Allan D'Arangelo, Yankee 290, (screen-print on wing mirror, steel and Plexiglas).

A real Yankee 290 branded wing mirror with the screen-printed landscape receding behind the imaginary vehicle.

D'Arcangelo is best known for his detached scenes of American highways seen through rear view and wing mirrors. They reflect part of the 'American experience' of truck culture with road signs and billboards beaming their simple messages from the verges of the interstate. The highway became a symbol of modern America in the late 1960s. In cult films like Easy Rider and Zabriskie Point it is the stage upon which the younger generation 'look for America' and rebel against authority.

Richard Hamilton, Whitley Bay, 1965, (oil paint on photograph laid on panel)

This work is based on a seaside postcard image of Whitley Bay. It is photographically enlarged to the point where the human figures begin to dissolve into the background and become unidentifiable abstract forms. Hamilton was one of the first British artists to use photography as a source of imagery in combination with paint and collage.

Eduardo Paolozzi, Greek Hero II, 1937

Joe Tilson, Letter from Che, 1969, (screen-print and collage)

The day after Che's execution in October 1967, his body was displayed for the press at the hospital laundry in the small town of Vallegrande in Bolivia. Press images of Guevara's body with paper clips, letter and dog tags create a kind of open file of his death.

Joe Tilson, Che Guevara, Cliptomatic, 1969, (screen-print on acetate)

This is one of a series of prints on acetate resembling photographic colour transparencies which Joe Tilson began to make in 1967 at the Kelpra Press in London with the master printmaker, Chris Prater. They included a set of The Five Senses and popular heroes like Che Guevara and the Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin. The use of overlaid red and green ink gives the figure of Guevara an almost mystical radiance.

Joe Tilson, Is This Che Guevara? 1969

Guevara's corpse was displayed for the world press like a trophy and instantly he was hailed as a martyr of revolutionary ideas. He remains a cult figure of the radical left.

Tilson uses a dot screen effect to suggest the grainy quality of a newspaper photograph. The image of Guevara fades out to the rubber stamped word DEAD. The collage includes a photograph of Guevara's friend and fellow guerrilla fighter Tamara Bunke who was killed in Bolivia shortly before him. The collage streamers show the Cuban flag and sections of a map of Bolivia.

Clive Barker, Shoe Head, (brass and leather in a box), 1984

In this work Barker explores the funny and disturbing way an object can be changed. An ordinary shoe becomes a violent, shouting head, its brass coating taking it another step away from reality. The leather shows through the brass but the shoe is now unwearable and removed from the everyday work.

Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Can

Andy Warhol, Jackie

David Hockney, Munich Olympic Poster, 1972