Georgia O’Keeffe vs Alex Katz

In the first week of March 2007, I went with Carol to the opening of Nature and Abstraction an exhibition of work by Georgia O’Keeffe at the Irish Museum of Modern art. I had seen a full scale retrospective of O'Keeffe's work in 1989 in the L.A. County Museum, and I had not been that impressed. But times change and so do people. Carol was a passionate fan of her work - and was utterly thrilled to see these great works by her hero. O'Keeffe of course was a female artist - who famously painted flowers that looked sexual in nature (the leaves of the flowers echoing the folds of the labia) was one of the first artists to develop an abstract vision, was the first woman to be given a retrospective in M.O.M.A. (the St. Peter's of the art world), posed naked for her photographer husband Stieglitz and later lived like a recluse in the dessert of New Mexico - so of course she was a great hero to many female art lovers. With artists like Gwen John, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, and Paula Rego, she was among a select group of female artists to have established a major reputation in the art world. However, whereas the work of Kahlo, Bourgeois and Rego could at times be violent and ugly - O'Keeffe's work was rarely less than beautiful even when she was painting animal bones.                             

  

Unlike other over admired female artists of my day, O’Keeffe's work bore up to close scrutiny. Maybe as an American artist she was not in the league of Hopper, Pollock or de Kooning. However, she was an infinitely more serious artist than other American's like Thomas Hart Benton, Barnett Newman, Milton Avery, Alex Katz, or a league of painters touted as important in New York. I continually stress O’Keeffe's gender, because it seemed so central to her work. She was one of the first painters to express a uniquely female vision of the world, and countless female art students of my day were still in debt to her. While female art of my day, was often beset with visual clichés of natural forms, human hair, genitals, wounds - O’Keeffe and Kahlo were pioneers in this territory, and so I thought it was important to remember how personal and original their concerns were in the male dominated art world of the early twentieth century.                                                                              

The exhibition which concentrated on O’Keeffe's more abstracted canvases turned out to be unexpectedly good - mainly because it lacked the more illustrative aspects of O’Keeffe's work which I felt were her weakest efforts. O’Keeffe was a keen student of nature - the veins of a leaf, the bud of a flower, the crease in a rock, or the bulge in a mountain could all fire her imagination. She could take these natural objects and imbue them with mystery and an abiding female presence. Perhaps it was unfortunate that she was famous mostly as a painter of flowers (seen in close up - influenced by photography), which seemed vulvic or womb like. Because in truth there was far more subtlety to her approach in her landscapes and abstractions than a mere reduction of nature to a saucy postcard.         

Although I could see some similarities in her work with Cézanne's pallet, Kandinsky's sense of abstract rhythm, and Dalí's playful metamorphoses of forms - over all her work was very much her own. Her pallet of pinks, apple greens, creams, mauve's and browns was beautifully displayed in her oil paintings. But it was her use of white - which I found revolutionary. From a distance many of her oil paintings looked like watercolours on slightly crumpled watercolour paper. Up close, O’Keeffe's gentle and sure brushstrokes feathered the colour into place. Occasionally she would let the white, pink or brown undercoat show through as a vein in a leaf or as a cloud - a wonderful indication of her sensitive and witty approach to painting.          

               

                                                           

However while this was a small and well-judged exhibition, I was disappointed not to see any of her lovely watercolours or drawings, some of which I would have prized over her larger oil paintings. In fact it was beyond me why so many exhibitions I had seen had been devoid of drawings, even when the artists involved were known to have produced significant studies. After all, drawings were the secret blueprints of art - which could unlock so much about the ideas and levels of skill of an artist, not to mention explaining more clearly the development of an artist’s forms.                        

Before we went to the opening, we went early to see the Alex Katz exhibition also in IMMA What an utterly repellent exhibition it was! Katz's was an eighty-year-old oil painter who emerged in the late 1950s with stylish paintings - which took a flavour of Pop art and mixed it with illustration to create 'safe' modish works of the rich. Some people called his work beautiful - I thought it was some of the most vulgar painting I have ever seen. I found Katz's use of colour to be utterly stomach churning - turgid peach, cake icing pink, baby blue, and shit brown! As for his figurative skills - they were utterly contemptible. He drew no better than a high school teenager.                                                  

It so happened that I had spent my life painting portraits of people, and I knew from experience how very difficult an art it was. But all my life I had battled away. Each time I painted a person, I looked and looked and looked again. Every face was different, and the light falling on someone changed by the hour. As a painter I tried to paint what I saw - when I saw it and how I saw it at that time. That meant that I tried to avoid the mannerisms and illustrative shorthand that painters could fall into.                                                                                                                      

But Katz's approach was almost the exact opposite. He approached the world through the illustrative forms you would be failure with in clip art or the New Yorker magazine. For Katz, people were ciphers - almost interchangeable. His mouths were all the same misshapen and swollen shape, the noses were all half-formed and his eyes were all as dead and lifeless as those of a mannequin. But the real give away for me was the way he painted eyelashes - painted individually hair-by-hair with all the subtlety of a doll maker! To his admirers Katz with his clichéd long brush strokes and creamy paint was a modern day Manet - but in reality he was not an even moderately skilled billboard painter. Katz was one of those painters whose work looked better in reproduction than in reality. He mixed the scale of the abstract expressionists with the short hand of pictorial illustration and a dash of French 'alla-prima' painting (meaning painting a picture in one go without correction.) The result? Facile and empty work all style and no content.                      

                                                        

Katz played up the fashion of his sitters - the Jackie O hairdos the leisure suits and the fur coats - which paradoxically made his work look very old fashioned. His paintings were needlessly big and about as deep as a puddle. Yet, despite their huge size - Katz's handling of details was fumbling and botched - god knows how bad a painter he would have been working on a small scale! There were some like Mathew Collings who rated Katz very highly, and considered him an important influence on young painters. God help them! I thought. If these were the idiots they choose to teach them, then all they would ever learn was incompetent modish pomposity.                                                

In fact, if Katz could teach young artists anything - I would have suggested – it was how to wine and dine the rich. There was a symbiotic relationship between the fawning Katz and the WASPS of Park Avenue, which resulted in vomit inducing portraits of rich Americans, but also a constant source of income for Katz. One painting of two middle-aged male wasps - was quite the most 'gay looking' painting I had ever seen and a psychopathic low even for Katz. The moral of the Katz story was that a tenth rate painter with good 'people-skills' and who painted rich people in New York, would be touted as important by the American Juggernaut - while painters of real talent who were unfortunate not to be born in an art world capital - would be forgotten. Even in Ireland, there were a handful of painters better than Katz - Robert Ballagh to name just one.                                             

The big surprise of our visit to IMMA was Thomas Demand's exhibition L’Esprit d’Escalier. Demand was forty-three and one of a handful of great photographers to come out of Germany at the turn of the millennium like Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky. Since I never read the blurb on the wall to exhibitions (preferring to go in cold, and tending to feel that if something needed a text to explain it then it was probably not worth bothering with) I was puzzled by Demand's huge photographs of office tables and security x-ray machines. They looked real, but odd. Something was not quite right about them. I felt they had the feel of Andreas Gursky's brilliant photographs in which he photographed places like the stock exchange, and then photo shopped them to make the places look bigger and more complex. Carol who had worked as an illustrator also thought that maybe the photographs had been photo shopped. So for once I went to the wall text and read... It turned out that Demand made cardboard sculptures to look like - phones, boxes, stairs, escalators, and cups of tea you name it. In fact, nothing in these photographs was real - it was all made of cardboard! I laughed my ass off! What fun! So then, we looked around the exhibition with a whole new take on things. This was the kind of conceptual art I liked - witty and very clever, but accessible to everyone. Of course, like many of the artists of my day, Demand questioned the nature of the 'reality' we were given in photography and the media - but like very few others he did it with humour, skill and real invention.                        

Robert Ballagh at The Royal Hibernian Academy

Later that weekend I went to see Robert Ballagh’s retrospective in the Royal Hibernian Academy. I went to slay not to praise – and I saw nothing that deterred me from this mission - in fact, Ballagh’s paintings only strengthened my contempt. Ballagh was nearly a household name in Ireland. Even those who didn’t know him knew his work - as he designed the old Irish bank notes, many of the Irish stamps and the set for the famous Riverdance show. Ballagh had emerged in the late 1960s as a self-taught Pop, cum Photorealist cum Trompe l'oeil artist.                                                                      

His work pilfered the grammar and technique of far more talented and intelligent artists from David, René Magritte, Hockney, and his Irish contemporary Michael Farrell. There was a frivolous and at the same time pretentious quality to Ballagh’s oeuvre which I found intensely irritating. Photo-realists like Ballagh had always been a pet hate of mine. The assumption behind their work – that obsessive labour, slavish copying of details, large scale and robotic technique would always produce masterpieces – I found unartistic and reactionary.                                                                                                

Despite being a well educated middle-class boy, Ballagh made much of his working class sympathies. His paintings often featured him reading such tombs as The Communist Manifesto or newspaper articles with headlines reporting the unemployment rates. But don’t imagine that his professed socialist and Republican politics prevented him from making money or brown nosing the establishment – because it didn’t. In fact, like most politically minded individuals – power and prestige was his goal, and rhetoric only a means of attaining it. If you had never seen a great painting in the flesh – let us say by Goya, David, Delacroix, or Hockney (all artists Ballagh had pastished) you might not understand just how dead and lifeless Ballagh’s art really was - but if you had, then the deceitful and crude lifelessness of his work became painfully obvious. The surface of Ballagh’s paintings was as dry and dead as a toenail clipping.                                                                                    
  
There was absolutely no need to actually see his work in the flesh – all one saw close up was airbrushing, stippling and blending of limp lifeless acrylic and oil paint (that looked like acrylic paint.) Ballagh’s vision of reality was as flat as a playing card and so his depictions of people often looked about as real as one of those life size cut out photographs actors advertised their films with – all surface and no depth.                                                                                                             
  
The retrospective was also notable for the complete absence of drawings. Ballagh like most photo-realists could not draw – instead he merely traced, stencilled and projected. What one could say about his drawing as evidenced in the paintings was that there was no inquiry into the nature or texture of reality, merely a colouring in of outlines. This was one major difference between Ballagh and Hockney his far greater English contemporary – for Hockney really could draw with assured and elegant skill.                                                                                                                                 
  
I mused that you did not need to be a Northern Protestant or English victim of the I.R.A. to feel utter revulsion at Ballagh’s portrait of Gerry Adams astride a mountain (yet another plagiaristic rip off, this time of David Casper Friedrich.) The conceit of both artist and politician/terrorist in this painting was literally gob smacking. But look closer – was Gerry Adams just happy to see us or was that a gun in his pocket! In fact I think it’s just one of many clumsy anatomical aspects to Ballagh's art. Ballagh despite his unwarranted success still felt aggrieved. His writings poured scorn on Modern art and the Irish art establishment which had not fallen to their feet in their praise of him. Of course was not alone in that. Every artist no matter how great – will always have their critics – it would be unrealistic and immature to believe otherwise. But what was different about Ballagh was the way he made this anger the subject of many of his paintings.                                                                         

  
In one painting – Still Crazy After All These Year 2004, he was seen from above in his large house wearing a t-shirt with Fuck The Begrudgers emblazoned on it. Other paintings displayed Ballagh digging bog, posing naked, or in political debate! I exclaimed to myself “I mean I am arrogant and conceited but this guy fucking takes the biscuit!” This contempt and self-regard was summed up for me in Highfield (1983/84) a painting of Ballagh at a doorway looking into the country side, by his easel on the floor was a torn up poster of a Picasso cubist portrait. The blinding metaphor being Ballagh’s preference for looking at nature not modern art. But subliminally the message was that Ballagh was a talentless egomaniac who loathed Picasso and modern art.                                                                          

Moreover, his pursuit of reality – it was as fake as a Rolex watch on a market stall. Ballagh like a mocking bird seemed to think that if he could copy something (a photograph, a Lichtenstein, a Pollock or a Picasso) he could prove his superiority. But all he really proved was that he had absolutely no concept of artistic integrity or style as a form of intellectual property unique to its maker (no matter how simple it’s technical means could be duplicated by thieves.) As you may had gathered – if Ballagh were born in Russia in the 1930s he would had been a socialist realist and maybe a successful one. Political people who hold a utilitarian attitude to the world loved art like this – devoid of feeling, propagandist and dead to the real complexity of the world and its interpretation.                       Leaving Ballagh’s dead canvases behind it was a refreshing relief to look at the messy gestural abstract oil paintings of Tim Hawkesworth. However, my relief quickly evaporated when I realized Hawkesworth’s paintings were nothing more than an incompetent miss-mash of Abstract Expressionists like Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly and de Kooning.                                                             

  
Before I left the RHA I decided to check out the down stairs gallery – what a lucky break! There I really did find paintings of great beauty, complexity, intelligence and originality by Colin Martin. The exhibition titled The Night Demesne featured oil paintings of the grounds of a country estate photographed with a flash at the dead of night. The paintings variously depicted flower beds, a boat and a peacock seen silhouetted against a lamp black night which shrouded everything in the distance beyond the limited range of the camera’s flash. From a distance Martin’s paintings looked like very elegant contemporary photographs but coming up closer one realized they were in fact lush oil paintings on board. And what paintings they were! Martin proved conclusively just how dim-witted Ballagh’s photo-derived paintings were in comparison.                                                          


 Unlike Ballagh’s paintings, Martin’s were full of mystery, elegance, and superb mastery of colour, tone, brushstrokes and composition. I would have quite happily owned three or four of these wonderfully emotive paintings and no doubt have spent years looking and looking again at them. While there was absolutely no need to view the Ballagh’s paintings in the flesh – Martin’s paintings just had to be seen in the flesh! Otherwise, the range of painterly effects, subtle brushstrokes, rich colour (including the skilful use of black one of the most difficult colours to use) and sumptuous glossy feel of the oil paint would have been utterly lost.