Emil Nolde: The Cunning Expressive Fascist

I got up early with Carol at 11am on Sunday 4^th March 2018, as we planned to go to see Emil Nolde: Colour is Life in the National Gallery of Ireland. Due to The Beast from the East and Storm Emma and the resulting heavy snow which had shut down Dublin for three days – the exhibition was free on Sunday. And Carol and I had such cabin fever after being stuck indoors - that we welcomed the opportunity to get out of the house.                                                                      

Emil Nolde: Colour is Life was the first major exhibition devoted to the Danish/German Expressionist in Dublin since a far smaller one in the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1964. It included 120 oil paintings, watercolours, prints and drawings from the Nolde Foundation dedicated to his art in his German homeland on the German/Danish border. Yet, even though I was delighted to view such a large body of work devoted to an Expressionist master - my enthusiasm was tempered by the early headlines of reviews of the exhibition that included Alastair Sooke’s Emil Nolde: fiery, nightmarish art by a card-carrying Nazi and Jonathan Jones’s Emil Nolde review - A seething visionary twisted by antisemitism. Knowing that I was going to write a blog on Nolde, I read in preparation every book on him I owned and every review of his art that I had in my files - and it was depressing reading. But I had hoped to make a traditional defence for the art - despite the man.                                      

After getting up, Carol and I got dressed and had a coffee before heading out to the Nolde exhibition. On our way down the snow strewn road, I told Carol “the important things to know about Emil Nolde was that he was an Expressionist rebel when he was middle aged but then a Nazi party member and lover of Hitler in old age! So the important question is can you separate the art from the life…” “No you can’t! I hate Nazis!” Carol interrupted. “So will we go back home?” I asked. “No! No! I like his paintings! I want to see the exhibition! And besides, they’re all dead now!” Carol replied. “Well the interesting thing is, that no matter how hard he tried to get the Nazis to approve of his art – they hated it!” I observed. After getting the DART into town we went to the National Gallery of Ireland and I bought the catalogue to the exhibition and we had mochas in the café to wake us up.    

                                                                                                        

The more I adore an artist the more I write about them – I can’t help it. But seeing this exhibition on Emil Nolde turned me against him - so frankly I don’t care too much about his life. Nolde is a perfect example of what I would call the “asshole rule” – namely, some artists - regardless of their talents and originality - are such assholes that you simple want nothing to do with them! Or in today’s parlance you stop following them on Facebook and Instagram. And one can only imagine what crap Nolde would have bombarded your Facebook timeline with - had it existed back in the 1930s!     

                                                                                                 

He was born Hans Emil Hansen in 1867, in the village of Nolde on the German -Danish border. His father was German and his mother Danish. His fundamentalist Protestant family were of rural peasant stock and his father was a farmer. Emil Nolde had a protracted and undistinguished training as an artist in art schools in Germany and France. In 1902, he changed his name to Emil Nolde. His early work was a bleak and sinister form of fantastical and Romantic kistch with which he was quite successful - but already it was clear that quite apart from having little real conventional talent as an artist he had serious personality problems.                                                                                                 

  

In 1906, he was asked by the artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff to join Die Brücke a group of young largely self-taught Expressionist painters based in Dresden that included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Max Pechstein. With them he found sympathetic peers and a style that suited his limited abilities. They shared an obsession with Vincent van Gogh (though they lacked van Gogh’s rigorous self-training) and desired to work as directly and spontaneously as possible. None of them were traditionally skilled artists - but they made up for their lack of conventional ability - with intense and original expression. The solitary and anti-social Nolde liked to keep his distance from Die Brücke and did not share their youthful decadence and liberal politics and within a year he and left Die Brücke. Yet, is debatable if he would ever have flourished as an artist - if he had not learned from them, appropriated their style and jumped on their bandwagon.    

        

Despite the Modernity of his style, Nolde was a socially conservative reactionary and although he painted many canvases depicting female religious nudes and decadent Berlin nightlife – he did so ambivalently even accusatorily. Usually socially conservative, sanctimonious, bigoted and philistine artists paint in an illustrative realist style - where things look like what they look like in photograph - and make common sense. But Nolde was unusual because he was a socially conservative, sanctimonious and bigoted artist who painted in a very up-to-date form of Expressionism - where the world was twisted and coloured according to his own right-wing, Libertarian vision. Formally, Nolde invented nothing – he simply amped up to eleven all the stylistic advances of van Gogh, Gauguin, Ensor, Munch and the Die Brücke artists. I might even suggest that - knowing he lacked the talent and skill to paint academically - he was cunning enough to appropriate the far less technically challenging Expressionist style. And frankly, I have seen and met far too many of these cute whores in the art world – though usually they lack even Nolde’s ability.                                                         

Nolde married twice, his first wife was a Danish actress and they were married for forty-two years and she was to become as much a fan of Hitler as himself, after his first wife died and when Nolde was eighty-one he married his second wife who was twenty-six, he was incredibly arrogant and fought with virtually everyone who crossed his path, he thought the term Expressionist did not do his talents justice, despite playing the tortured artist and outsider he was a shrew marketer and skilled businessman, inspired by Paul Gauguin he travelled to the South Seas in 1913 and painted the natives in an effort to appropriate their culture, he wrote a self-pitying and arrogant autobiography the second volume of which titled My Struggle was published in 1934 and which contained many supportive comments about Nationalism and anti-Semitism perhaps to get the approval of the Nazis, he sold truckloads of paintings, his work was in countless German museums before the Nazi’s took power and removed them in 1937 and thirty-three of Nolde’s paintings and several of his works on paper were included in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition – in which Modern artists were viciously mocked by the Nazis. After the war, despite his Nazi party membership, Nolde was absolved by the Denazification Committee and thinking him a persecuted Degenerate Artist, German curators put back up Nolde’s work. And so on. There are plenty of books on Nolde to read - if you really want to know the rest.                                                                                     

After our mochas in the National Gallery of Ireland’s café and a couple of cigarettes outside in the freezing cold, we went into the exhibition. Emil Nolde: Colour is Life was not hung chronologically but rather thematically and the oil paintings were hung in simple dark frames that superbly suited the work and avoided the distorting plague of gold gilt frames. The work was hung against the dark walls of the museum and spot-lit in a thrilling manner - that also suited their sulphurous nature. But looking at the mostly crude and sinister early paintings in the first room was a shock to the system. Even in the earliest canvases from 1901 when Nolde was already over thirty-four, it was clear that Nolde had little natural talent or conventional skills as a painter or draughtsman and his blaring and creepy work gave me a headache at first. But in the next room his work began to improve greatly. Though my concentration was disrupted for a while by a group of mothers and fathers with their children - who seemed to think the National Gallery of Ireland was a free crèshe - and great opportunity to loudly discuss their remarkable children.                                                                                     

           

Getting back into looking at Nolde’s work, I tried to think of another so-called major painter whose work varied so much in quality - from the crude and amateurish to the simply sublime. Yet, if anything this gave me greater faith in his integrity as a Modernist painter. Although the overall strategic style of Nolde’s work remained almost constant throughout his life - he took tactical risks with brushwork and colour in all his work. Nolde had the daring and courage to experiment and go for broke in every work he made. I have noted many times when looking at expressive work - that the greatest Expressionist and Neo-Expressionist artists – go to formal extremes no timid amateur ever would. Nolde’s refusal to get bogged down in details or worry too much about realism, his daring to paint from his imagination and simplify and amplify forms through directional brushstrokes, pastose paint and vivid colour - made him an archetypal Expressionist painter. Nolde’s pallet was uniquely his own and throughout his work he used the most incredible variety of vibrant yellows, reds, blues, purples, greens and oranges and he rarely used tones to shape forms - preferring to use different intensities of colour.                                                                                                                                                

By the room with scenes of Berlin night life Nolde was in full force and these spot-lit paintings glowed incandescently in the dim gallery. Yet already there were sinister overtones - that only viewing the work in the flesh really revealed viscerally. Many of the decadent men and women in these café scenes had ‘Jewish’ hooknoses but even worse was Noldes depiction of a Slav couple in Slovenians from 1911. On the other hand, his writhing female dancers in Candle Dance from 1912 were Expressionism at it ecstatic best.                                                 
                          

When we entered the room dedicated to Biblical themes I began to feel very uneasy. As an atheist I did not share his belief or religious furore. Besides, I did not think that Nolde was really convincing in his ugly religiosity.  For me, Nolde was far too selfish, obnoxious and intolerant a man - to claim piety and humility and I was repulsed by his hell and damnation view of life. When I stood in front of Martyrdom II from 1921, my stomach turned at the sight of Christ on the cross surrounded by monstrous looking Jews. And I nearly fainted in distress in front of such a crude, ugly and blatantly anti-Semitic work.                                                                                                                          

As I went around looking at the other portraits and figure paintings in the exhibition - I had the creeping feeling that I was looking at the world through an illustrated Nazi guide to ‘untermensch’ (‘inferior people’). Nolde’s portraits and figures revealed him to be a rural misanthrope at best – and an Aryan racist at worst. Nolde’s tendency towards caricature had the Expressionist defence that he sought to capture the essence of people – but it also meant that he simply did not look close enough at other people (because he actually hated them) and thus crudely reduced them to what he thought were their essentials. But it is notable that he paid far more attention to his Aryan models from his hometown and depicted them far more sensitively and beautifully. There were of course exceptions to this, and though most of his male figures from the South Seas were vulgar racial caricatures others were profoundly dignified - and Nolde did in fact have a great interest in ethnography and ‘primitive’ cultures – which was one of the reasons the Nazis could never accept his art.                                                                                                                                            

Then I came to the so called unpainted pictures a series of small watercolours on thin Japan paper that Nolde claimed that he had painted in secret when banned from painting by the Nazis and painting in oils was too risky. Yet recent research had discovered that many of the watercolours might have been painted before the ban and others even painted after the war and that despite the ban Nolde had still managed to paint some oil paintings during the ban. The unpainted pictures were still as formally inventive and delightful as they had been when I had studied them enthusiastically in books over the years – but I no longer shared any sympathy for Nolde the martyred artist.  In the grand scheme of things, the fact that the card carrying Nazi Emil Nolde was banned from painting - is small beans compared to the genocide of the Jews and extermination of gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill and political and artistic dissidents, the terror state of the Gestapo, the destruction of Europe and the sad tales of flight of other artists who refused to live in Nazi Germany and were terrified their actual lives were at risk.                                                                                      

                                                    

The last room was the least contentious with Nolde’s seascapes inspired by Turner and Nolde’s flower paintings which provided him with a pretext for the most vibrant displays of pure colour. Carol and I loved his large late oil painting Large Poppies (Red, Red, Red) from 1942. In these late, free flowing paintings Nolde achieved an inimitable mastery of his own. But overall I found Emil Nolde: Colour is Life one of the most morally depressing exhibitions I have ever seen - and I was actually very upset by it for quite a few days.                                                                                                                                  

As you know, I have been a fanatical lover of Expressionist art since my teenage years and after Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – Emil Nolde was my second favourite German Expressionist. But in the late 1980s when I started reading about Nolde - the popular books I read on him concentrated on his work from 1907-1914 and ignored his later life - apart from mentioning that when the Nazis took power they confiscated over 1,000 of his work from German museums, included him in their exhibition of Degenerate Art and stopped him from painting and exhibiting. What they failed to mention was that in later life Nolde became a rabid anti-Semite, racist, member of the Nazi party and courted its officials like Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler - who initially admired his work. The irony was that Hitler despised the Expressionists - and every attempt by Nolde to ingratiate himself with the Fascist party that he loved - ended in abject failure. Not only did Hitler and the Fascists want to re-create a Classical conception of art – they hated Modern art which they thought a con and Jewish conspiracy, they loathed non-Western art and wanted to annihilate any vestige of personal expression from art since Romanticism. So naturally, an oddball painter, lacking in most conventional academic skills like Nolde - was an anathema to them. Despite himself, Nolde was as much a Modernist painter as he was a reactionary political bigot. You would think that after being having his work confiscated from museums, after being branded a Degenerate Artist, after seeing German democracy gutted and after seeing the hell the Nazis brought to Europe - Emil Nolde would have turned against Hitler. But no. This character still supported Hitler right up to the end! After Hitler had brought death and destruction to Europe and eventually to Germany itself and Germany was defeated and Hitler was dead - Nolde underwent denazification - and successfully presented himself as a politically naïve Degenerate Artist persecuted by the Nazis. And since Germany needed to find some heroes somewhere to rescue its reputation - Expressionists persecuted by the Nazis were lauded and ushered back into German museums - and sneaking in with them, was the far from naïve, cunning old fox Emil Nolde.                 

             

As a teenager and rabid read of Catcher in the Rye, I, like Holden Caufield, loathed the hypocrisy of the world and in particular the phoney game players who always succeeded in getting to the top. I still do. I have spent my life trying to find genuine artists who were not also operators and media whores. But life teaches you that there is hardly anyone you have ever heard of that was not cunning like a fox - though the likes of Emil Nolde took it to extremes. For example, people naïvely believe that artists, writers, musicians and actors just appear on our TV - because of the indisputable quality of their artwork. But artistic quality is entirely subjective and thus the perfect vehicle for hype. So nearly every TV appearance by artistic types including so called charity work has been stage-managed by public relations agents and backed by commercial funding and the tribal support of the artistic community. And once you are somebody with financial power – you can always find people to make excuses for you - if only because they are invested in your success and they will share in your disgrace. Moreover, the general public and media machine which cares only for ratings - will usually forgive an artist everything - except failure. Nolde profited from these various laws and like artistic celebrities today, Nolde knew how to jump on every artistic, social, moral and political bandwagon going - in order to increase his profile and relevance. Initially he played up the role of the isolated Expressionist rebel unconcerned for the decadent and material world. When by 1922, he had turned himself into one of the most successful and richest artists in Germany - he played the role of the strutting master. Then he jumped on the growing Nationalism and anti-Semitism in Germany to continue his relevance, side-line the challenge of French art - and push aside those that might challenge his position. And initially he successfully courted Nazi party members like Goebbels and Himmler. He was so craven that he even denounced Max Pechstein an Expressionist rival as a Jew (he luckily wasn’t) in order to end his career! And when Nolde himself was persecuted by the Nazis and banned from painting - he managed after the war to use this - to turn himself into a martyr. You could say that he at least had the integrity to continue working in the Expressionist style that had brought him so much trouble from the Nazis – but maybe he had such a psychological, intellectual and political form of arrested development and such a paucity of conventional skills - that he had no ability to paint any differently. Besides few seventy-year-old's change the style of their lifetime. His final cunning genius was to ingratiate himself back into the German and Danish art worlds and societies - and since most of Germany had actively supported Hitler - they all had a vested interest in promoting the idea that there had been great and good German artists like the Expressionists who refused to bow to Fascist aesthetics – so Emil Nolde was pardoned by default and fêted with exhibitions throughout Europe before his death in 1956.                                                                          

Of course, separating the art of an artist from their personality, politics and sexuality is a contentious issue - especially in today’s toxic political environment. But personally, thanks to my self-destructive and obscene honesty - I have never been given the benefit of such equivocation by the art world. Traditionally artists and members of the art world jealously guard the autonomy of art against the knee-jerk bigotry of the general public - especially since the typical political agitprop of the art world is extremely left-wing. But art history constantly throws up artists who even the art world finds difficult to defend. Like Emil Nolde there were many Modernist artists, writers and intellectuals who were infatuated or complicit with Fascism including painters like Salvador Dali and Francis Picabia. There were also murderers like Caravaggio and misogynistic, sexual predators like Picasso and paedophilic fantasist painters like Schiele and Balthus. And every season, new biographies on artists we love - reveal unsavoury character traits and behaviour that make us question our admiration of their art. Yet, who amongst us is without sin?                                                                                   

I do not think that Emil Nolde was ever a truly great artist of the first rank - but to me as a lover of Expressionist art - he was an admirable one from a distance. So I thought I could make a classical defence of Nolde the artist deserving to be separated from Nolde the Nazi. However, since Nolde was not only a reactionary religious bigot, racist, anti-Semite and Nazi - but also an inherently phoney conman who got away with it – I can’t.              

                                             

So I want to make another kind of point. In today’s political climate, there is an ongoing threat to free-speech and practice of no platforming individuals whose opinions and lives we oppose. But we cannot reduce art history to a list of the most blameless, if only because - artists by nature are often selfish even sociopathic creatures whose lack of concern for conventional morality - is married to formal originality. Thus, much of the best art ever made - was produced by the kind of obnoxious people - you wouldn’t want to deal with personally. More importantly, we cannot censor history according to our own contemporary present day moirés. Because the most fascinating thing about history is that it is another world, long since passed - that is often a complete contradiction of ours - but which we can learn from!              

Fundamental to art history and history in general is truth - and what we choose to do with that truth. Those that seek to alter that truth or hide it (like those historians that tried to hide or downplay the complicity of artists like Nolde with the Nazis or those that would seek to ban exhibitions of Nolde’s work now) - are the true enemies of art and history, civilisation and humanity. Because we never know when and where a lesson is going to be imparted. I have studied World War Two, the Holocaust, and the Nazis since childhood and I thought I had understood the nature of German anti-Semitism, racism and bigotry. But looking only at the monsters of Fascism can have a dulling and predictable effect. Of course they would behave so dreadfully - they were sadistic sociopaths! Far more troubling, is the story of those that we might admire artistically - who sympathised or collaborated with the evils of Fascism. One of the constant slurs against Expressionism from Marxist critics is that it heralded Fascism, but for me blaming any artists in the 1910s for what emerged politically in the 1930s is grossly unfair. However, with an artist like Nolde who was admired by the likes of Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, Marxists do indeed have a prima facie case.                                                                                              

Looking at the Expressionist paintings by Nolde - I was taken off guard. I loved the myth of Nolde the Expressionist rebel, I adored the immediacy of his style and his volcanic colour - so I felt at home formally with him. Moreover, seeing previously only a handful of Nolde’s landscapes and still-life’s in the flesh and looking at most of his figure paintings in reproduction gave me a false idea of the man. Not only do reproductions of artworks give one a false sense of scale, touch and texture – they abstract and anonymise the character of such works - making real humanistic interpretation impossible. Seeing Nolde’s work in quantity in the flesh – I was stabbed in my heart by Nolde’s Aryan pride, Nationalistic bigotry, religious sanctimony, crude anti-Semitism and racial stereotyping. It felt like going to meet a beloved hero hoping for an enjoyable chat about art - only to be assaulted by a bigoted and racist rant - which left me wondering if I had ever really known them and feeling disgusted. But I had learned a valuable lesson.

Ten Leonardo da Vinci Drawings at The National Gallery of Ireland

On Thursday 9^th June 2016, Carol and I went into the National Gallery of Ireland to see ten drawings by Leonardo da Vinci from the British Royal Collection. Dublin was bathed in the golden light of dusk in late spring and the women on the streets seemed to glow with fecundity though none more so than a beautiful, slender, auburn haired, golden tanned, pregnant woman in a bright pale blue sun dress and with flip-flops - I saw passing outside the National Gallery.                                                                                                      
                        

I had not ventured out to see an exhibition in about four months and I was frankly sick to death of contemporary art and saw no point in frustrating and angering myself anymore with the trivial, commercial and eager to please crap of my peers and wondered why anyone still wanted to make or write about art. Art for me had ended in 1985 when Neo-Expressionism stopped being the major movement of the day and Neo-Geo took its place. I simply did not give a dam about the zillions of pastiches and rehashes of style done with such a waste of materials and human energy since 1985 and whose only merit was commercial, moralistic or as the embodiment of identity politics. I could not identify with an art world that had turned from an arena of truthful, personal, freedom of expression - regardless of the personal cost - into a gilded cage populated by extreme left-wing and Feminist moralisers who schizophrenically also hung around art galleries and private member’s clubs trying to sell their art to corporate billionaires. I was now just a highly informed philistine and carried on with my own art because it was the only thing that kept me sane. Moreover, as a middle-aged artist, I had long since stopped being influenced by other artists and had come to realise that no one could help me in the midst of my painting - than myself. In fact, I had to think hard to think of the last exhibition that had actually inspired or aided my own work. But I really would have a been a philistine - if I had passed up the opportunity to see drawings by da Vinci! And as it turned out, this was to be one of the most inspiring exhibitions I had seen in a long time.                                            

I had glanced at the drawings on the National Gallery website and was struck by how introverted and lacking in bravura flashiness they were but I hoped that in the flesh they would have more impact. Seeing them in the dimly lit gallery space was thus a revelation. Da Vinci’s drawing were on thin sheets of paper mostly no bigger than postcards and I had to peer to see all their details. What I saw in the flesh was a grandeur of vision on a small scale - I had never witnessed in any other artist. Only Dürer came close to da Vinci’s power as a draughtsman on a small scale. The paper da Vinci used was made of cotton rag, hot pressed and no more than 90lb in weight. The paper was so thin that one could see the marks from the verso of the sheets - which he frequently made use of on both sides. Those sheets that had drawings on both sides were exhibited in double sided glass frames which one could walk around. The exhibition started with a short and succinct video demonstrating the materials and techniques of da Vinci the draughtsman. As you know, I loathe video pieces of any kind in exhibitions, but as a technical geek, I found it highly informative and loved hearing about the materials da Vinci used.                                     
                           

You know one of the reasons, I got an E in my first ever essay on art in Art College at the age of eighteen, was because it was on Picasso’s Les Demoiselle d’Avignon and since I had never seen it in the flesh - I found it almost impossible to write about. I still haven’t seen Les Demoiselle d’Avignon and I still don’t feel fit to write about it. I was nineteen then and even now at forty-five - I find it as hard to write about art works I have never seen. Seeing da Vinci’s drawings in low resolution JPGs on the National Gallery website gave me little idea of the material quality of the drawings in the flesh. Even when I went home and looked at the drawings in high resolution photographs in various books on da Vinci at home - I found the experience strangely detached. But in the gallery, where I had to navigate other viewers, peer into the glass frames under dim light and strain to see all the fine details of da Vinci’s line - it was a full erotic experience.                                                                              
                                                      
The last time I had a chance to see da Vinci drawings was in 2007, in the Chester Betty Gallery, but I had come away from that very frustrated and disappointed. The Codex Leicester, actually contained no standalone drawings, and those on the margins of The Codex Leicester were restricted to water and engineering - a subject I had no interest in and even if I did, I did not speak Latin and did not have a mirror to reverse da Vinci’s famously reversed writing. So it was a relief to finally see drawings of real impact in this exhibition. The ten drawings captured some of da Vinci’s chief interests, a female portrait with da Vinci’s much copied enigmatic and benign smile, a study of blackberry bush, study of river water damage on an embankment, studies for horses, studies of cats and one drawing of from a series of ten about a deluge which reflected da Vinci’s pessimistic fascination with the end of the world. There was nothing narcissistically flashy or extravagant about these drawings. In fact, they seemed incredibly private and introverted works made for da Vinci’s own pleasure and understanding. They convinced slowly and devastatingly.                                                                                                                                  

The great criticism of da Vinci, was that he had so many ideas - but realised too few of his projects. That is of course true, which is why it is his drawings that are arguably his greatest achievement, because it is in them that we witness his encyclopaedic interest in the natural world and plans for his many inventions. Today, these are prized almost as conceptual statements worthy in their own right - irrespective of whether or not he actually ever carried them to fulfilment - and in fact a sketch by da Vinci is often more important and profound than whole frescoed rooms by his technically skilled and hardworking but dim witted peers. Not only was da Vinci an incomparable genius at the start of the Renaissance - he was a genius with an open arena to play in - and you can see the pleasure and intensity of experience he brought to all his studies. He was like Columbus discovering America - or more recently Steve Jobs at the start of the personal computer age – with limitless room for discovery and an unassailable right to call himself the first and best - before many. Moreover, da Vinci’s omnivorous intellect and knowledge meant that everything he drew no matter how humble - was freighted with such an intensity of scrutiny and understanding - that he could make even a few branches from a blackberry bush seem epic in import.                                                            

The last great artist to bring such fresh intensity to the sketchbook from life, was the teenage Pablo Picasso in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, even though I have always considered drawing from life a vital part of one’s training, I have always had my doubts about the practice of students today being told to go out into nature and the city - to draw life - because so much of our real lives today are experienced through mediated images - that drawing from nature and physical human life - is actually unnatural and a hopelessly nostalgic, escapist fantasy. Scurrying out on expeditions into the real world - to do drawings from life today - is about as cliché, retrograde and mendacious as the nature poems of ‘poets’ living in tower blocks surrounded by digital screens, listening to Beethoven on their iPhones. In this Post-Modern world, real life only happens - when there is a power cut – and we don’t enjoy it!                             

Unlike like so many artists since the invention of photography and the cult of Impressionism, da Vinci’s drawings, did not superficially record the fall of light on bodies or objects – instead they recorded both the inner and outer structure of forms - and tried to find the source of their life. His vision of the body and nature was thus not of the fleeting and subjective but rather of the timeless and ordered. Moreover, da Vinci’s drawings proved that not only was he a great draughtsman working from life - but even more importantly - he was a great draughtsman working from his memory and imagination. Take for example his sheet of drawings of cats which are all perfectly realised in all kinds of rest, motion and fight. I have drawn periodically my cats and know that even when asleep they rarely stay still! So to draw them from life when they are resting is difficult enough - but almost impossible when moving. So da Vinci’s drawings of cats were as much about his almost photographic memory and knowledge of their anatomy as mere observation. Likewise, in the final drawing of a deluge, we see da Vinci’s knowledge and imagination create an image beyond mere appearances that may have been incorrect in minor details but overall - was epic in it cataclysmic vision of nature.                                                                                                          

For me da Vinci is the greatest draughtsman in art history because of the vastness of his range and subject matter - with only Dürer coming close to him. He continues to be an influence on young artists and Jean Michel Basquait for example was obsessed with reworking, blowing up and roughing up da Vinci’s drawings - particularly those related to anatomy. Da Vinci’s humble drawings for me were like a blessed liberation from the tyranny of the Post-Modern Neo-Salon artists of today like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and countless other rich nobodies who try to cow their peers with vast projects executed by teams of hired underlings, skilful failed artists, technicians and factory workers. You could frankly pile up all the tonnes of ‘art’ produced by most of these Post-Modern, Neo-Salon Robber Barons and it would not mean a fraction of what a tiny, feather weight drawing by da Vinci means - not only to me - but to Art History. That is why da Vinci is so inspiring - he offers no excuses to the young artist. So you can’t afford to hire thirty lackey painters to paint vast oil on linen photo-realist confections or fifty foundry workers to take a toy you found in a Poundshop and turn it into a ten-ton bronze? So you can’t even afford a small canvas and oil paint? Surely you can afford a sheet of paper and a stick of black chalk? Let’s see what you can do with that! And if you do paint - just paint twelve small and medium sized - timeless masterpieces!

Trivial Contemporary Irish Art vs. the Grandeur of the Old Masters

On Tuesday 2ed June, Carol and I went into town at 11:30am to go to see the 185^th Annual RHA Exhibition and then to visit the National Gallery of Ireland. I would not have bothered going to the Annual RHA Exhibition, but Carol, had wanted to see Tracey Emin’s neon writing piece Wanting You.  Frankly, by the age of forty-four art contemporary art had lost all meaning to me - and if it wasn’t for Julian Schnabel - I would have virtually no interest in contemporary art and even his work of the last twenty years had largely been one disappointment after another.                                       

                                                           

Still, Carol  was delighted to see Tracey Emin’s neon writing piece Wanting You immediately in the foyer - though for me it was a vacuous piece that formally had taken from Joseph Kosuth’s use of neon writing - and was only interesting because it took an expressive sentiment and turned it into an adult bookshop sign. Which made me wonder if any authentic expression was possible today - especially in an art world determined to embrace ironic conceptualism and rabid commercialism. Besides, I had long since fallen out of love with Emin after getting sick to death of seeing her on television  - and she had become nothing but a desperate, self-involved celebrity droning on about her suffering while raking in the cash and claiming that - despite all evidence to the contrary - that she could actually draw! Not only could Emin not draw, she couldn’t even make interesting bad drawings. In fact, I had long since lost interest in the whole yBa movement – which had proved to be so artistically limited and hypocritical in its early Punk posturing and then rapid commercial whoring and smug membership of the RA.               

                                    

To say I was unimpressed by the vast majority of what was on offer in the RHA is an understatement. Though at least it was an open submission exhibition that theoretically at least offered everyone a chance. I found the commercialism, snobbery and elderly, upper-middle-class nature of the RHA nauseating. It was certainly not a club I wanted to be part of - and never had. Despite applying to countless galleries and accumulating over ninety-eight rejections - I had never applied to the RHA and never wanted to! I considered it a betrayal of my anarchistic ideals.                      

                                                

As usual the Annual RHA Exhibition was a mixed bag and the sheer quantity of work on display made it more a treasure hunt in a junk shop than a contemplative experience. I was very fond of John Behan’s bronze sculptures - some painted white - in particular Famine Ship in which the emigrants were blowing like sails in the wind. Though I did wonder when Irish nationalists would stop milking the famine.   

I was very impressed by David Begley’s large charcoal drawing of an x-ray which was both quite contemporary and technically a tour de force, moreover it was far superior to previous paintings I had seen him make and there were other excellent charcoal life drawings and landscapes but by people whose names I instantly forgot.                                                                                                                                

Dorothy Cross’s Silver Plates one with a cast dead bird and the other with a castrated penis (though in the art world they call it a phallus that symbolises the penis), was just another pastiche of Louise Bourgeois by Cross and another sign of an art world run by women and ineffectual, chastised men that delighted in images of castrated males and repellent anti-sex images. Yet woe betide the male painter who continued to paint naked women especially in a sexy way!                             

                                    

I was baffled by Alice Mahar’s bronze sculpture Goddess after Canova which was on an Yves Klein blue pillar. Overall it reminded me of the short lived fad in the early 1980s for the Italian Anachronisfici pastiches of Neo-Classical art by the awful painter Carlo Maria Mariani - and Maher’s work was just as pointless. I wondered if there was anything Mahar was not prepared to pastiche? And was anyone in the Irish art world ever going to call her on it? Apparently not, because here at least - they thought her a genius - and nothing critical could ever be said of a female artist these days!                 

                                    

In fact most of the sculptures on display at the 185^th Annual Exhibition, were dismally conventional or crassly wacky - in a desperate attention seeking way. The exception being Stephanie Hess’ March Hare - a sensual and deceptively simple abstracted hare in patinated bronze that actually looked like it had been carved in stone - and which I craved to touch.                                                                                

                

Eithne Jordan’s bland paintings of streets and interiors in a facile, generic, contemporary style left me cold - and all I could remember was that I had preferred her when she had been a more Neo-Expressionist artist back in the late 80s and I wondered if she would ever find out who she really was.  Diana Copperwhite’s painting Fake World II did little to impress me though everyone else seemed to think she was amazing. To me she had one idea – take a large 4 inch flat paint brush and apply different colours to its sides and middle and then swipe the rainbow of colours all around the painting in vaguely figurative shapes. It was a flaccid, crass and gimmicky version of what some might consider - seen at a considerable distance - to be a wonky, late, drunken de Kooning. Yet it was too pretty and desperate to please - to ever be as great as a de Kooning.                                                                                         

James Hanley’s comical drawings from monuments and sculptures were absurdly stupid works which proved to me why his work was so unconvincing, he aspired to classical values but he had the personality of a clown. Hanley’s huge unsubtle portraits in oils were so bad they reminded me of illustrational murals on a toy store wall.                                                                         

A far more convincing work was Geraldine O'Neill’s large Drawing which was similar to her large oil painting Is feidir le cat Schrödinger an dá thrá a fhreastal which had been shortlisted for the Hennessy Portrait Prize ’14 and I had hated. This time however, I found O’Neill’s Drawing to be a far more coherent and satisfying work, though I still found O'Neill caught between wanting to be a pretentious Old Master and gimmicky contemporary artist – resulting in work that satisfied neither desire.      

                                

Colin Martin’s painting of interiors like a sound studio were above average though not as good as work I had seen him do years ago - because they seemed comparatively rushed and unfinished. Donald Teskey displayed some actual soul in his expressive Irish landscapes though they were very conventional works.                                                                                                                                                           

Rapid Eye Movement an oil on panel painting by Darragh Dempsey of a woman’s legs seen poking out from under a bed and spot lit by a torch was a technically accomplished work that actually haunted my imagination.                                                                                                                               

       

There were probably many more quality works that I did not look at properly because I was so dazed or appalled by the surrounding rubbish. And trying to make sense of why some works sold and so many others did not - I could only think they did not match people’s interior decoration. I found, so much of the rest of the art at the 185^th Annual RHA Exhibition, posturing and pastiched art that was desperate to be liked, flattered to deceive and grandstanded its supposed technical skill which in fact was mostly nothing but the following of formulas, largely pointless and not worth the effort. So many of these works were trying to ape photography or were obsessed with memetic skill - but without any consideration for original ideas, deeply felt emotion or an authentic vision of the world. Mostly it was schooled art by technician’s who had learned some shortcuts but who were not real artists and who despite tricking out their work with contemporary themes were as bourgeois, conservative, sanctimonious, sentimental, twee, kitsch and unoriginal as their boring, ludicrous and instantly forgettable predecessors in the RHA a hundred years ago.                                                                                                       

                           

Moreover most of this art was politically and socially correct to a fault, parroting the new liberal consensus around sexuality, the nationalist consensus around Irishness and the political right wing consensus around economics. That, I too shared some of these views - did not stop me feeling uneasy in such an age of conformity, group think and rabble rousing - and I itched to be contrarian. Fed on bohemian myths of Modernist transgression and rebellion, I had decided as a youth to become and artist, but now as a middle aged man, I realised that rebellion in art was just a Hollywood fiction and the forces of coercive academic, commercial and stylistic conformity were vast in comparison.                                    

                        

Of course to these respectable professionals, my art was offensive, deplorable, unacceptable, and nothing to do with art as they saw it. Yet, I frankly did not care a wit what they thought of as art – in fact the whole idea of ‘Art’ had become questionable to me because; art had once again become; an academic exercise, success required such incredible networking and media whoring, styles had become as meaningless as musical one hit wonders, art was never going to be anything but a censored, glorified and moralised version of reality, artists would always strive toward ever greater self-aggrandising pretension and obscurity and art was largely nothing but a business like any other - where ‘rebels’ were nothing but entrepreneurs posing as Punks. After the blip of Modernism, art was again the most bourgeois, sanctimonious and conventional thing to do imaginable - yet it pretended it was still radical.                           

                       

So for me, the vast array of pastel and grey coloured paintings - mostly painted in a similar way - blended into one amorphous academic mass of conformity. Even the more youthful and gimmicky works by younger artists played with the same clichés of NCAD painting and Vitamin P (the much passed about book on self-consciously contemporary, arty illustrational painting) that I had become all too familiar. And the so called expressive works were risible cartoons of expressivity by buffoons not tortured souls.                    

 

I noticed how stupid many of the abstract works looked amongst figurative paintings, photographs and sculptures - which made their aesthetics seem slim and insignificant. Even abstract artists I had previously thought highly of in solo exhibition like Richard Gorman - looked exposed and vacant and I was astonished his work had not developed or changed in nearly fifteen years. If ever a style need the unchallenged megalomaniacal solo exhibition space it was Abstraction - especially if it was very mediocre abstraction. There was a whole room full of artily staged looking photographs, many of them magazine supplement quality - but I simply did not care about the vast majority of photography as an art form.                                                                                                                                         

               

In the basement some head banger in a balaclava and army fatigues was in a cage pottering about, amongst new canvases still in their cellophane wrappers. In fact all he had seemed to do is scrawl on a white board for a few minutes and then go out for a cigarette break. I took one look at him and walked back upstairs. I had no idea what he was trying to say or why he chose to stage a revolution in the bowel of academia - and I didn’t care. Besides I had done a far better performance piece in an art gallery in 2002!    

Of course all the above was my own personal opinion and one not shared in the Irish art world by all accounts. In fact if one was to judge by critics like Adian Dunne and Cristín Leach Hughes most of this art was splendid. For Irish art, with it incestuous familiarity, did not operate on the principal of open critique but rather on the basis of opaque favours - handed out to those in the beloved inner circle - and wordless banishment to all those not deemed worthy. In other words, you were either exhibited by curators or not and mentioned by critics and praised - or ignored completely. Such a ‘humane’ system where if you couldn’t say anything nice you said nothing at all - allowed nothing in the Irish art world to be questioned and nobody’s position to be revealed. ‘Geniuses’ were presented to you and you either believed the hype or were a philistine - not worth inviting to their dinner parties. The unfashionable, obscene, ‘non-artists’ living in oblivion, were denied bad reviews - and the possibility of historical redress - that had been accorded so many of the heroes of Modernism. Thus in its way this new liberal consensus held an even greater death grip over culture than the conservative anti-Modernist culture it had over thrown.                                              

Getting a headache from the sea of mediocrity we left and headed to Hodges Figgis, where I bought The Essential Cy Twombly a beautiful tomb on one of my favourite artists of the past sixty years and one of the biggest influences on my own art. I also bought Keeping an Eye Open a collection of essays on art by Julian Barnes whose writing instantly impressed me – which was not easy. Barnes brought a novelist eye to the lives of many of the great French masters of Romanticism, Impressionism and Modernism and gave me a refreshingly jargon and theory free perspective to their art. In fact, when I started reading it at home a few days later - I could not put it down! Barnes instantly became one of my favourite contemporary literary writers on art up there with the sadly departed John Updike. (Then at the end of June, I was delighted that Barnes’s Keeping an Eye Open was the book at bedtime on BBC Radio 4 and even though I had read it by then - I enjoyed hearing Barnes reading extracts from it.)                                                            

Then we went to the National Gallery of Ireland and went around the Sean Scully retrospective which had a few surprisingly beautiful paintings from the mid-1980s which made me slightly reassess my poor opinion of him. However, he remained in my mind the most overrated painter of the past thirty years and a desperately limited one at that. Looking through a catalogue to the exhibition, I saw a large number of his early figurative works from the 1960s - which were sadly not included in the exhibition because they would have given me a great source of merriment! There were one or two promising life drawings, but overall his figurative work was appallingly bad – tenth rate at best – so I found it amusing that he had the cunning to ditch figurative art and become an abstract painter hailed as one of the foremost painters alive! Personally I thought there was more artistry in the stone wall makers of the Aran Islands (whose walls Scully photographed in some of the better works in the exhibition) than in him. Yet the likes of Scully, were the professional model to follow in the debacle after the death of Modernism. His academic pedigree, his teaching posts, his rabid commercialism, his incessant exhibitions of his over 1,400 paintings of rectangles - were acceptable to every country in the world from Communist dictatorships, Islamic Kingdoms and Western democracies where taking politically correct offense had become endemic and forming Twitter lynch mobs a sport.             

                                                                                                                      

Finally after an afternoon in the bogs and foothills of art we ascended near the peak with a look around the permanent collection which though largely mediocre - compared with the likes of The National Gallery in London, Louvre, Prado, Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie or the Metropolitan Museum of New York - still possessed paintings of a technical skill, sophistication and humane ambition that made what we had seen earlier in the day look like the pathetic efforts of remedial students. Perversely, this more quietly spoken art revealed truths of beauty, which the noisy shouting of mediocrity could not even envision, and rather than bludgeoning the viewer with claims of importance, which turned out to be nothing but a sales pitch, this great art uplifted and inspired in ways we today are not even fully conscious of - because our visual awareness and attention span has become so scatter-brained, distorted and debased. Compared to the garish sound bites of contemporary art these paintings by the Old Masters were visual epic poems of the most entrancing kind. However, I wasn’t even interested in looking at the overly familiar world class masterpieces by the likes of Titian, Vermeer or Goya. Instead I wanted to spend some time looking at other quality works that I had not seen in a while, like the stunning 14^th century altarpieces replete with old gold leaf and displaying naïve but endearing form and intense and loving faith in God. Though looking at them I felt a shiver of sadness at these alters ripped from their churches and reduction to aesthetic objects - as well as a curiosity about how they originally looked in the churches they had been painted for. Still, in their thick, wooden, amputated reliefs - they had a tremendous suggestive power. Some young women laughed nervously at their naïveté - yet surely they were whistling past the graveyard – unnerved by an uncanny vision so alien to our modern world. For who are we to judge their work? Yes, their perspective and anatomy was naïve by later standards - yet this was compensated for by an obsessive faith in God we cannot even imagine. Personally, I did not believe in God, but if anything artistic was going to persuade me - it was these paintings.                                                                                                                                                 

As for portraits, there was not a woman or man able to paint as convincing and regal a portrait as Sofonisba Anguissola’s Portrait of Prince Alessandro Farnese from around 1560 and which was a far better proof of female talent in painting than the hysterics of Feminist artists since the 1960s. I also was entranced by the torch light painting The Image of Saint Alexis attributed to Georges de La Tour with its mixture of chiaroscuro, dramatic torch light and classical solidity of form  - which made the efforts of RHA members look like gaudy computer generated graphics.                                                                                          

As for still-life, just take Jan Weenix’s Game-piece: the Garden of a Château, from the 1690s. It was a relatively minor genre painting by a minor painter, however its mastery illustrated to me the tragic technical and intellectual gap between our contemporary efforts in paint with those before the advent of photography. I remember first seeing this painting as a young boy teaching myself how to draw. I studied How-To-Books in which almost the first lesson was how to draw an apple - that was rendered as a schematic line drawing of what looked more like something made of quartz. I could not imagine then, just how far I would have to go to ever attempt something like Jan Weenix nor did I know that I would never reach that point nor have the temperament or sanity to achieve it. Moreover, I did not know that the whole idea of representational painting would be called into question by my later study of Modernism and Post-Modernism and embrace of Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism.                                                       

Yet, I was delighted to see this old friend again, and marvelled at its sumptuous display of atmosphere and sensual and tactile surfaces from; the damp dusky sky above a limpid classical landscape in the background, to the ripe fruit and brace of birds, cockerel and the dead hare hung by its right paw and slumping forward in a diagonal pose that was reminiscent of Ruben’s The Elevation of The Cross. It took the sad death of an animal and made it tragic and lamentable. Yet it did so without the psychotic ranting of vegans today, and it made it clear that this was simply the way things were in the natural world where men still killed what they ate. Every object in Game-piece: the Garden of a Château had its own feel, from the damp of the sky, to velvet feel of the flowers, to the fuzz on the peaches to the fur on the hare and every inch of the canvas had hidden details like classical sculptures in the background and busy insects on the fruit. There was not a single painter alive who could paint like that convincingly nor was society set up to encourage such patient and selfless labour nor was any audience willing to spend as much time contemplating it as the painter had on painting it. Neither today’s painter nor his audience had the patience or focus to look for hours at the same image and forsake all the millions of others spewed out by the internet daily. Nor did we believe in ancient symbolism or understand their meanings in the visceral way those schooled in them once did. So Jan Weenix’s painting illustrated for me all that we had lost and could never regain - but which we would be fools not to at least acknowledge. That was the glory of art history - it proved a constant rebuke to those contemporary manipulators who try to pretend things can never be any different or we are living in a golden age of geniuses or that we are progressing toward some kind of utopia.