Julian Schnabel at Hillsboro Fine Art 2009

Tipped off by a friend on MySpace, I learned that an exhibition of works on paper by Julian Schnabel was on its last day of display in the Hillsboro Fine Art gallery, which specialized in 20^th Century and Contemporary Art. So on Saturday 10^th October, at 9:45am, I left my house full of excitement and travelled into town on the bus over-flowing with expectation. I had hoped Carol would join me but she had to sleep after a night of collaging.                                                                                                      

Hillsboro Fine Art, was directly opposite the Rotunda Hospital’s new entrance on Parnell Square. However when I arrived at the gallery at 10:30am - when it was due to open - I found the door locked and the galleries lights off. In desperation, I rang the intercom three times and then knocked on the door three times, before realizing there was no one there. From the window, I could see a beautiful Schnabel painting on paper - under glass and framed in a lovely black frame. I was so close and yet so far!                                                            

I decided to go to Chapters bookshop in order to kill sometime - where I bought a small book on Egon Schiele. Then I went back to the gallery at 11am but it was still closed! So I went down to Easons’ to look around. It was absolutely packed with news people, photographers and slack-jawed heavy-metal fans, pressed around to see Ozzy Osbourne who was signing books. I saw the back of his head as he signed autographs but I felt contemptuous of the whole circus. I went to McDonalds and had a Big Mac meal, which I loved.                                                                                                                                       

Then I went back to the Hillsboro gallery only to find it still closed at 12pm. I was just about to leave when a gallery woman came and unlocked the door. “Eh, is the exhibition still open to view?” I asked her desperately. “Eh, yes you can come in, but I am only here to receive a delivery.” She replied in a kindly manner. “Oh, thank you! I’m not a collector, I’m just an artist but I came into town especially to the Schnabel’s! I am a huge Schnabel fan!” I exclaimed. She let me into the gallery and turned on the lights.                                                                                                         

Apart from Schnabel’s works, the exhibition New York Contemporary included small paintings on canvas by Ross Bleckner, Donald Baechler, David Salle and Jeff Schneider - none of which I was very impressed by - in fact I could think of countless Irish painters who had shown better works in Dublin in recent years. But, I was delighted and enthralled, by the Neo-Abstract-Expressionist Schnabel works on view.                                                                                                                

He was represented by about six hand-painted screen-prints, with resin dripped on them. They dated from 1995 and came from editions of 80. In fact, despite the fact they were in part screen-prints, Schnabel’s personality oozed from them. Again, I was struck by the Joie de Vivre of Schnabel’s Neo-Salon brand of Expressionism and its total lack of angst. The colours were bold and strong – fuchsia pinks, cobalt blues, and darker blues and burnt reds - brushed on in semi-thick, textured, gestural strokes - around which he wrote words like; La Blusa Rosa, Otono, Mujer, Invierno, and Primaveral’ which gave the works their titles. The works reflected Schnabel’s new life with his Spanish wife Olatz and his visits to Spain that year. They were inspired works, which relied on Schnabel’s subconscious manipulation of forms and materials. They reminded me of late Miró canvases that mixed surrealism with the sale and effects of Abstract-Expressionism and the later works of Cy Twombly with their ad-hoc mixture of classical words and abstract scribbles of paint. The largest pieces like La Blusa Rosa I were about 40” x 32” where as the others were slightly smaller at about 40” x 30.” They were all works on stiff watercolour paper of an average quality. Dripped and pooled on the paper, was thick golden looking resin, in anthropomorphic shapes, which proved very effective and suggestive of phalluses or torsos. Even if to the uninitiated, his work could have looked slap-dash, haphazard and crude - I was struck by the artfulness within the apparent chaos of Schnabel’s work. I found his abstract works emotionally engaging and his brushwork skilful and measured. He just had a knack for making beautiful splashes and swirls of paint - which evoked thoughts of places and people.                                                                            

There was also a colour lithograph based on a black and white photo of his stunningly beautiful wife Olatz. She looked out of the picture with a sultry stare, with her hands behind the back of her head - above which he had crudely painted in white My Wife. It was merely a family snapshot, given the professional artists gloss, of a fine art print enhancement and glorification. It was factory made Expressionism and the weakest work on show. The work was the 31st print, of an edition of 2000, and was selling for €2, 500! The more ambitious pieces were not priced. Despite the worst economic depression in Ireland since the 1930s, I was astonished to find all the Schnabel works had sold – though I agreed with the buyers and only wished I had that kind of money.                                                                

Also in the show were works by Jeff Schneider who used a cowboy motif repeatedly, but his efforts looked little-better than a young graduates efforts. There were a couple of black and white paintings in oils by Donald Baechler, which I liked, but did not think they added up to much.                    

            

I looked around to find the David Salle works but could not recognize them. Ross Bleckner was represented by two small oil still-life’s of flowers in a kind of fuzzy Post-Impressionistic style which left bare linen underneath to add to the fuzziness. I thought them utterly redundant works. So I concentrated my last few minutes looking again at the Schnabel’s and for once I was consumed with the desire to own art. I thanked the woman and left soaring on air as I walked back through the city.

Northern Stars and Southern Lights: The Golden Age of Finnish Art 1870-1920

On Sunday 10^th January 2009, I went with Carol to Northern Stars and Southern Lights: The Golden Age of Finnish Art 1870-1920. After the fitful genius of Paintings from Poland in November 2007, I had high hopes that this exposé of Finnish art would be as enthralling. I cannot say that it was, but then I was not in a good mood when I saw the show. I found the exhibition of Finnish Art a grim experience. Dublin was cold and snow was expected. I was feeling old and fearful for my mother’s health and for my future – so seeing parts of this exhibition was like being taken into a melancholy ward to die. I found many of these paintings gripped with a nihilistic hopelessness that I could easily identify with. However, for once I longed for more beautiful escapist art.    

                                                                                                  

The show was dominated by pictures of pretty children, sorrowful children, pretty women, working women, social deprivation, middle-class bliss, winter landscapes and strange Nordic myths. Overall I found the technical standard of drawing and painting quite high. It was Salon art with workman like draughtsmanship, unusual compositions and odd pallets dominated by whites, greys, greens, pinks and blues– often in an attempt to outdo photography with minute details, intense lighting, obscure narratives and symbolically laden subjects.                                                                                                         

The exhibition was divided up thematically into six sections; Naturalism in Finnish Art, Influence from France, Epic Landscapes, Legends and Myths, The 1900 World Fair and Early Modernism. In the first section there were some sorrowful paintings of children by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, but nothing compared to the apocalyptic looking painting Under The Yoke (Burning the Brushwood), 1893, by Eero Jarnefelt. It was an odd painting, combining the usually idealistic and flattering techniques of academic art - with agi-prop social record. The soot covered face of the little girl in the centre of the painting, her clothes in rags, standing in front of burning fires of wood, smoke billowing up around her - as she stared out bleakly at the viewer - haunted my nightmares for months to come. As social propaganda against; child labour, the exploitation of the poor and the ecological destruction of the land - it was compelling. Its grating Naturalism was unforgettable - however as art I did not think it worked. It lacked the universal vision of a true masterpiece.                                                                                                                                 

Albert Edelfet was represented by Conveying the Child’s Coffin, 1879, a large luminous painting of a group of people on a boat - bring a coffin across a lake. In was typical of much of the socially conscious academic art of the 1870s which was inspired by the socialist examples of French masters like Courbet and Millet. Edelfelt superbly deployed academic drawing, composition and tonal-shading – enlivened by a lighter more Impressionist inspired pallet - to record a grim moment in Finnish life. Edelfelt had captured the intense low light of the North excellently and the painting seemed to radiate. However, it had a staged, posed and wooden feeling that made it unconvincing as great art.

Fanny Churberg was represented by some wonderfully fresh alla-prima paintings of skies painted with vigorous and intense flat brush strokes. In fact they were some of the few - free and sensual paintings in the show. On the other hand Pekka Halonen in The Short Cut, 1892 and later in The 1900 World Fair section with Washing on the Ice, 1900, managed to paint some of the bleakest, most depressing and frigid pictures I had ever seen.           
                                                                                        
Later in the Influence from France section, Albert Edelfelt was this time represented by much more atmospheric, sensual and romantic paintings of pretty young women; reading books under trees, learning to play piano, or posed looking invitingly at the viewer. Other’s like Gunnar Berndtson and Akseli Gallen-Kallela also proved themselves adept at making attractive portraits of pretty middle class Finnish girls - and recording the easy going delights of family life. 

Some of the landscapes represented Finland as a barren, inhospitable, lonely wilderness. The extreme coldness of Finland depicted was unusually poignant to me - after weeks of temperatures as low as -3 degrees Centigrade in Dublin. So, I marvelled at these painters fortitude painting in an even colder climate – sometimes out of doors!                                                                                                   

The unsurpassed masterpiece of the landscape section (and maybe the whole show) was Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Imatra in Winter, 1893. This huge canvas of an icy river, bounded by banks of deep snow and trees densely frosted with snowflakes was epic in its intensity. Gallen-Kallela had managed to go beyond the merely picturesque and animated nature. His masterful and evocative use of a Mirada of whites haunted my imagination. However most of the rest of the landscape section was undistinguished - apart from its unusual Northern topography. 

The low point of the show for me was the Legends and Myths section, with its crude folk revival art that verged on the comically bad. It exposed the poverty of Gallen-Kallela and Hugo Simberg’s imaginations, the limitations of their technique and immaturity of their visions. Akseli Gallen-Kallela reappeared again with two of the most ridiculous looking paintings I had ever seen. Aino Myth, Triptych, 1889, which seemed like nothing more than an excuse to show lots of naked Finnish girls being chased by a long bearded old man. (Although I did enjoy seeing his use of the ancient Nordic Swastika all around the frame of the picture - long before in the hands of Hitler it became a symbol of race-hate, vengeance and death.) While The Forging of the Sampo, 1893, looked like nothing but a children’s book illustration rendered with all the skill and lack of imagination of an academic oil painter. I hadn’t a clue what any of these old myths meant and I didn’t care – I hated myths.  

At least Akseli Gallen-Kallela had technical skill, Hugo Simberg on the other hand was as crude as an adolescent. His work was too illustrational and rudimentary – he simply did not have the visionary power of James Ensor working in Ostend or Edvard Munch in Oslo at the same time. 

The final modernist section, like with that of ‘Paintings from Poland’ in 2007, displayed a noticeable decline in originality and authenticity as Finnish artists pastiched (with some skill and panache) the latest trends of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism in Paris. They were always four or five years too late, and never contributed anything new to these movements.  

Seeing most of this art only served to prove to me how necessary modernist’s like Cézanne, van Gogh, Munch, Matisse and Picasso had been - to render truly visionary and technically powerful art in an age of polite and commercial art. Their oeuvres had taken the same questions of; social life, form, subjectivity, primitivism, myth and sexuality – which these Finnish and a host of other minor European artists had been battling with - and given convincing, hard won and transcendent answers.                        

Overall, I found this show educational and enjoyable. Given my depressed mood, I felt I had not given the exhibition a fair enough look. So I instantly vowed to go back again when my spirits were better. However, unforeseen events would make that impossible.