Showing posts with label Velázquez. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Velázquez. Show all posts

30/01/2015

Disillusioned Trip to a Diminished National Gallery of Ireland



On Tuesday 30th December 2014, Carol and I went into the National Gallery of Ireland. I had avoided the National Gallery for a few years because I could not stand to see the museum I grew up with - reduced to a few rooms of selected highlights. However, I was interested in seeing the Hennessy Portrait Prize ‘14 and its twelve shortlisted artists - though I was shocked to see they had converted the old café into a cramped space to show the portraits. Portrait painting had suddenly become quite fashionable again with shows like Sky Arts Portrait Artist of The Year which Carol and I had greatly enjoyed - if only because we always liked to see artists working and amongst the shortlisted artists at the Hennessy Portrait Prize ’14 was Comhghall Casey who had twice appeared in the early heats of Portrait Artist of The Year. Still, in the age of modern media, I tended to find portrait painting as anachronistic as calligraphy, pottery or basket weaving – of course it could still be done but why bother? For me portrait painting only had continuing value if the artist could present a vision different to the one mass media already supplied - which is why I tended to think most conventional naturalist or realist painting pointless.                                                                        
Overall, I found the twelve works shortlisted for the Hennessy Portrait Prize ’14 mediocre - although with flickers of promise here and there - and most represented a particularly conservative, bourgeois and middle brow notion of the portrait that seemed to bypass the most troubling insights about modern alienation and mediation of Expressionism, Cubism, Pop or Post-Modernism.                                             
I thought Comhghall Casey’s self-portrait the kind of third rate kitsch realism of someone who acted as though the last two hundred years of painting hadn’t happened. Casey’s self-portrait was a deluded, smug, self-satisfied, self-portrait by someone who could draw and paint in a conventional and generic manner but knew nothing about art history and thought they were an Old Master living amongst us.        
Gavan McCullough’s arrogant looking self-portrait - a kind of paint by numbers version of Lucian Freud that displayed the dubious ability to make luscious oil paint look like latex - showed similar delusions but also a contempt for either himself or the viewer depending upon whether he had painted it looking in a mirror or camera lens.                                                                                                                               
Una Sealy’s portrait of her son was an even more blatant sugary pastiche of Lucian Freud and with none of his intensity, angst or relentless scrutiny. The backstory of Helen O'Sullivan-Tyrrell’s blurry portrait of her daughter sick in hospital was moving and humane, but undermined by its generic Gerhard Richter/Luc Tuyman’s blurred and muted painterly grammar which frankly tens of thousands of art students have mimicked worldwide for the past twenty years to no great effect. The only reason I could fathom for the popularity of this style was its contemporary stylish look - that allowed painters to shamelessly use photographs - and its comparative ease of production.                                                   
Geraldine O'Neill’s huge canvas Is feidir le cat Schrödinger an dá thrá a fhreastal - depicting a girl holding a plastic bag with a goldfish which was quite well painted into a feeble copy of an old master painting probably of Flemish origin upon which she then drew childlike drawings - was an awful pretentious mess just like its title. O'Neill’s desperate attempt to look profound fell as flat as her attempt to paint like an old master which literally came apart at the edges of her wonky and fitful drawing and painting. All in all it reminded me of some of the most generic Post-Modern pastiches of the Old Masters from the early 1980s. Worse still was the hectoring symbolism and attempt to seem profoundly intellectual. For me this cat was clearly dead. But I noticed that this confused pastiche and grand attempt to be what people popularly thought was the work of a real painter had pulled the slack jawed crowd around it.                                               
The winner of the exhibition had been Nick Miller’s Neo-Expressionist portrait of fellow painter Barry Cooke who had sadly died this year, however despite being in a style I admired I thought it crabbed, crude and even adolescent - despite Miller being middle aged.                                                                      
Despite loathing video art, I found Saoirse Wall’s work Gesture 2 - in which she lay in a bath with white tiles beside her and in a white dress as she looked out at the viewer challengingly – actually quite intense and unsettling and it remained in my memory. It was reminiscent of Frida Kahlo’s vulnerable paintings of herself in a bath or Tracey Emin’s photographs of herself in a bath looking exhausted by debauchery and fame. Wall’s Gesture 2 also had more impact when seen in the gallery where her gaze could unsettled the viewer unused to portraits looking back challengingly at the viewer.                 
                          
Hugh O'Conor’s sepia photograph of Beckah, a young black woman working in Dublin airport was the most beautiful and moving work in the show and a reminder that one can find moments of beauty in the most mundane places.                        
                                                                                                                                
But the most interesting work for me was Cian McLoughlin’s Tronie a menacing yellow smear of a head that from a distance appeared almost in profile yet close up appear frontally. This was the only painting in the show that had any spark of original and modern feeling for me.                                                        

Then we went around Lines of Vision a section of highlights from the museum’s permanent collection selected and written about by famous Irish authors. Though I was pleased to see again some of my favourite works, I found the experience of the overall exhibition unbearable. The white walls and blaring lights suited the high keyed modernist’s works but made viewing the darker Old Master paintings difficult. The room was thronged with people talking loudly, answering their mobile phones and the audio from a video piece of the various writers discussing the work with added music and being shown at the end of the exhibition space could be heard throughout the gallery. The only bright spot was the sight of a few beautiful arty girls with glasses and notebooks studiously looking at the art – but as a monogamous middle aged man I could now only imagine them as characters in someone else’s love story. Then there was the plague of text on the walls and throngs of people reading them – which meant that it was impossible to concentrate on the work. I remembered coming to the National Gallery as a twelve-year-old bunking-off from school, being almost alone save for the guards in the vast rooms - and becoming totally lost in particular brushstrokes and passages of drawing - but that kind of meditative loss of self was impossible these days of mass tourism and the mass cult of art as entertainment.                                                                          
I had become a painter to avoid having conversations with other people - though in later life I did enjoying talking about art with my girlfriends - my preferred conversations were with paintings. I had become a painter to avoid the written word but now museums were consumed with a diarrhea of text turning galleries of paintings into reading rooms and temples into freak shows. And art now had to be mediated by writers giving personal anecdotes about their fondness for such and such a work in the museum and how it influenced them – yet another example of the dominance of literature in Ireland. Even my own writing was a subconscious attempt to explain my work to a society that would not dream in paint. Perhaps such text helped the uninitiated - but personally I thought it was better to read about art at home and make the most of the time in galleries actually looking at the art. Worse still was the jumble sale assembly of paintings heedless of chronology, school or style, which hung masterpieces of world class stature with provincial daubs by Irish mediocrities turning everything into rubbish. It was like going to an insane house party where people were playing classical music, jazz and rock and roll in the same room – creating nothing but a berserk cacophony. I have frankly seen countless student exhibitions better curated than this costly vanity exercise. I thought an exhibition that included masterpieces by the likes of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez, Monet and Bonnard could be nothing but awe inspiring - however if this show proved anything it was what philistine curators could do to the art they were entrusted with. Moreover, by removing the paintings from their historical schools and matching them with works created centuries later and of no real similarity they robbed all the work of their historical meaning. For example I loved the work of Jack B. Yeats and regarded him as the greatest Irish painter ever, and valued the radical expressive power of his work - but when his late gestural oil paintings were hung beside the Old Masters - he looked like a demented lunatic. I had noticed this cataclysmic rupture between modern painting (let’s say from Cézanne and the advent of mass photography onwards) and Old Master painting (let’s say from Giotto to Manet) particularly in exhibitions that disastrously pared Picasso with Rembrandt, Velázquez and Goya. I was sure that Picasso was the genius of the twentieth century - but his art was a slap in the face of the Old Masters and comparing his late cartoony doodles in paint after the old masters - was like comparing a savage issuing a torrent of profanities with gentlemen reciting poetry. Yet if Post-Modernism had proved anything it was that the past could now be used and abused in whatever way present philistine curators wanted - after all the dead cannot speak in their own defense and the living are always secretly flattered by the ludicrous comparison.                  
Still, I was delighted to see again Jusepe de Ribera’s Saint Onuphrius one of the most touching and humane portraits of an old man I have ever seen. Ribera’s handling of the old saints wrinkled and worn skin was heartbreakingly sympathetic. I loved the way Ribera built up the hands of the Saint with dark, cool brushstrokes and then modeled the highlights with warm, light accents than came alive as weathered and wrinkled skin. In fact, Ribera was one of my favourite artists and one I thought sadly overshadowed by his peers like Caravaggio. Yes, Ribera lacked Caravaggio’s history changing style but arguably he brought more emotion out of his subjects, was more humane and handled paint in a more interesting way.                                   
Amongst the cacophony of verbal, literary and visual bombardment, I managed to glimpse again the astonishing naturalistic verisimilitude of Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ and admired again his revolutionary use of chiaroscuro and composition - though again I thought his brushwork and handling of paint was relatively uninteresting from a modernist perspective.    
                                                                    
Looking again, at Caravaggio’s paintings in books in the weeks following our trip to the National Gallery of Ireland, I was reminded of my contradictory nature. I was usually disgusted by the sentimental kitsch of film, novels, music and art that flooded the world with positive uplifting notions about humanity and demanded that art reflect the tragedy of existence. However, when I did find an art like Caravaggio’s - all I wanted to do was return to the safe embrace of sentimentality. There was only so much pain in art one could bare. I wondered again, just what was it about Caravaggio that put me off his work? Caravaggio was many things I admired, he was a rebel, revolutionary and dark brooding genius and briefly as a selectively mute and troubled shut-in teenager I had hero worshiped him - but I quickly came to infinitely prefer Rembrandt - who had humanized his use of chiaroscuro and set paint free to express the inexpressible. What I did not admire about Caravaggio was his murderous pride and sinister narcissism even if I could partially empathise with both. While Caravaggio’s paintings were ruthlessly brilliant and possessed a darkness of damnation that had appealed to me as a teenager – as a more mellow middle aged man I found his vision almost sociopathic and his paintings too arrogant, fatalistic, lacking in humane virtues and obsessed with a largely homoerotic vision I did not share. While there had been many artists in history I had daydreamed about befriending - if I had seen Caravaggio approaching me in the street I would have braced myself for a fight. 

                                                                                                    
More importantly, as an expressive painter, I found Caravaggio’s highly finished painting style was so enclosed that it allowed me very little room to understand him on a personal level. If brushwork is the personal handwriting of an artist - which can provide an insight into their soul - Caravaggio built an impenetrable wall of illusion between himself and the world. His paintings were too dependent on his naturalistic talent and not enough on intellectual or sensual virtues. So I lamented his early death at the age of thirty-eight and thus consequent lack of a late mature style that could have revealed more of his character. It was almost as if after finding his rough trade models and staging them in his dramatically lit compositions in his cellar and perhaps using some kind of optical aid like a mirror to fix the drawing – painting them was just an (admittedly brilliant) afterthought.                                                                                                

Perversely I felt that the hyper-naturalism of Caravaggio ran counter to any real faith in God’s intervention. Everyone in Caravaggio’s paintings appeared doomed to act out religious rites for a God who either did not exist or would never intervene. Equally perversely the hyper-naturalism of Caravaggio - worked against imaginative transcendence. Looking at his work I felt like I was looking at an admittedly brilliant theatrical recreation – but theater none the less. Thus I saw him as the first post-religious painter and perhaps the first modern painter in his tragic articulation of man’s dramatic abandonment. Caravaggio revealed us to be doomed actors on a stage not of our making and with no escape. Our actions seemed real to us - but they were already scripted by fate or forces beyond our control. It was this hopelessness realism of Caravaggio – his illumination of the stage set of our existence that unsettled me the most. That is why even though I no longer could enter his world as I did as a mute teenager I could still acknowledge his unsettling genius.                                                                                                                        
Yet, to me, Caravaggio’s paintings were a fait accompli and viewers were left to either worship them or not give a dam - and as a middle aged man - I was mostly one of the latter. I had no doubt that if Caravaggio was alive in the age of cinema he would have been a masterful and enigmatic cinematographer or director - but like with Caravaggio the Baroque painter I had problems with the aggressively theatrical, declamatory and rabble rousing nature of a lot of cinema.                                                                          

Back in the National Gallery of Ireland, a tear nearly came to my eye when I saw the newly repaired Monet Argenteuil Basin with a Single Sailboat that had been punched by a malcontent who thankfully got sentenced to six years in prison – it was a long prison sentence but he had a long history of burglary and vandalism. If you looked closely you could still see where the painting had been torn as conservators now rightly ensured all their repairs could be seen and undone if necessary. The Monet was one of Carol’s favourite and she too nearly wept, “It’s such a beautiful and harmless painting! Why would anyone want to damage it?” Frankly, I had no clue, but it revealed to me again how many malignant forces of aggressive destruction - were arrayed against every act of creative freedom. One odd surprise was a Patrick Graham crucifixion study print After Giovanni di Paolo, from 1998 - which was little more than a sophisticated crucified stick figure - that reminded me of a very weak Paul Klee doodle. Normally I loved and highly rated Graham’s work, but I could not decide if After Giovanni di Paolo was glib or profound and finally settled on glib, superficial and scarcely worth the bother of a print run.                                                                 
Amongst the curatorial rubble, Vermeer’s Woman Writing a Letter, with her Maid glowed jewel like and almost made me weep. Though Vermeer’s measured and highly finished painting was the total opposite of the kind of painterly painting I admired - I found every inch of his painting and every brushstroke captivating in the most unexpected ways. I had been painting for over thirty-four years, so I was usually harshest on other painters - if only because most of the time I could see how they achieved what they did in their paintings - yet when looking at passages of painting by Vermeer I was still baffled by how he did it. While I was convinced that Vermeer had used a camera obscura to aid his paintings, I did not think that fully explained his uncanny distillation of reality, after all, over a hundred and fifty years of mass photography had passed and nobody had even remotely approached Vermeer’s genius for verisimilitude and magical realism - and more pertinently the intense need for such work had been eviscerated by the immediacy of mechanical reproduction. If Vermeer had used a camera obscura it would have only given him a basic basis for a drawing - he still had to have a masterful understanding of oil painting, perfect tonal pitch and a refined ability to place the right brushstrokes just so. Besides, Vermeer’s paintings were much more than a dutiful record of visual reality, since he spent half a year or more on each painting - they were as much about memory - in the kind of heightened way that the image of a beloved friend, lover or moment is longingly recalled in our mind. No wonder then that Proust the famed author of À la recherche du temps perdu (translated in my old copy as Remembrance of Things Past though now more literally translated as In Search of Lost Time) was one of the greatest admirers of Vermeer. As important as his use of the camera obscura must have been the influence of the superbly talented Carel Fabritius who painted the sublime Goldfinch and was Delft’s greatest painter until Vermeer – and who would surely be better known had he not been killed by an explosion in a nearby gunpowder magazine - which also destroyed most of his life’s work. Compared with virtually everyone in the exhibition who haphazardly threw down cliché brushstrokes - Vermeer’s brushstrokes spoke constantly of the most captivating delight in close, patient observation and reconsideration - such that the only comparison in modern terms could be with Cézanne - although his interior compositions also found echoes in the work of Edward Hopper. Moreover as an artist with perfect taste, Vermeer’s deep symbolism - that spoke of a world beyond the enclosed domestic spaces he inhabited - did not irritate like most attention seeking symbolism does - but rather enchanted and created a sense of wonder.                                                                                                                                          
Anyway, I could not bear to stay any longer in the National Gallery and we left after just an hour. I only hoped that when the National Gallery refurbishment was finished in 2016 that - the museum I loved would be returned to its former glory. Exasperated I ranted to Carol that the only gallery in Dublin that was maintaining standards was the Dublin City Museum The Hugh Lane and doubtless on less funds.        

Thankfully my day was improved no end when I returned home and found that The State of The Art by Arthur C. Danto from 1987 - had finally arrived in the post almost eight weeks after I had bought it online. I wanted State-of-The-Art because it had a dismissive review of Julian Schnabel and mentioned Neo-Expressionism disparagingly and I wanted to read them for my own essay on Schnabel. Both the review on Schnabel and Danto’s remarks on Neo-Expressionism were something of a disappointment - since Danto’s criticisms were ones other writers had phrased with more wit and originality. However, I found I greatly enjoyed Danto’s other critical essays even if I found his constant reference to the iconoclastic revolution of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes - which Danto seemed to think marked the end of art history – tiresomely hyperbolic. Personally, I just did not believe art progressed toward anything and thus it could never come to an end – it just merely repeated itself eternally – that was for me its joy and pitfall.

14/03/2014

The Last Weeks of Love: Madrid 2004



"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."
Anais Nin

"Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels."
Goya

Thankfully, before going to Madrid, my mum gave me €500 spending money for my holiday which greatly helped fund my holiday. On Wednesday 30th June 2004, Helen and I got a flight to Madrid. Helen and I arrived in Madrid at 4:30pm. After putting our things away in the hotel, we walked around the city centre. That night I drew marker sketches in my sketchbook.                                                


The following day we went to see the Julian Schnabel exhibition in the Palacio de Velázquez. The American Neo-Expressionist’s retrospective was main reason for our trip to Madrid. Like with Basquiat, I admired the democratic lack of technical skill of Schnabel and grandeur of his ideas. However when I finally saw so many Schnabel`s in the flesh, I found my high opinion of the American's dented. Schnabel’s work promised more than it delivered, he was like a flamboyant self-taught singer trying to ape an opera singer yet unable to hit the high notes of pure ecstasy and profundity of a maestro. Compared to Max Beckman, Jackson Pollock or Bacon he was just a theatrical, decorative, showy Neo-Expressionist. That said - I still found great beauty in many of his canvases.     
         

Schnabel compared himself to Picasso, Beckman and Pollock. Yet I wondered aloud in the gallery, where was the deep angst and deathly seriousness about technique and feeling that was present in their work? Schnabel's figurative drawing was woefully inept. There was absolutely no sense of a real study from life. Schnabel's drawing was lumpy, crude and awkward. He was unable to give his line or contours spring and weight. Schnabel's drawings of faces were adolescent and naïve - his eyes were too big, his lips too fat and his noses too long, flat and poorly shaped. In the plate paintings, Schnabel's impasto was 'ready-made' by the broken plates. The emotion of the impasto was thus conceptualized with a modern twist. In fact, the paint brushed over the plates was often very thin and sometimes transparent - it was a sculptural, gimmicky impasto - not a tormented or intense impasto. Repeatedly, I wondered where was the deep emotional impact that I had come to expect in Schnabel's work from reproduction. Schnabel's paintings were highly mannered affairs. In comparison to Schnabel - my paintings look compacted, explosive, thickly impastoed and dense. Moreover, my work was even more adolescent and uncouth. Everything in Schnabel's abstract paintings was staked on controlled chance and immediacy. My work in comparison looked too contrived worked out and ordered. However, I saw no torment in Schnabel's work.


Schnabel's abstract paintings were simple designs on a large scale and he used size to intimidate and overwhelm the public. Schnabel obviously ripped off Victor Hugo, Tàpies, Twombly, and Polke in works like this but his paintings lacked the originality and myth of their work - they were too modish and theatrical. His shapes were evocative of the natural world, graffiti and abstract expressionism and sometimes Schnabel came up with beautiful and elegant drips, swirls and blotches of paint. However, I was left wondering if any of his biomorphic shapes had any real meaning in the way a Klee, Kandinsky or Pollock did.                                                                                          


In the abstract canvases of the 1990s, Schanbel’s brushwork was increasingly rough, impetuous and ad-hoc and the canvases were covered in accidental drips, tears and spots of paint. He painted all his abstract shapes in a semi-thick, semi-opaque run of colour and at great speed - so the slathered paint on his canvases often looked sloppy and disingenuous. Sometimes he was happy with a few smears and shapes but other times he worked the image up densely. Most of the time it looked like Schnabel started his abstract paintings with no planning and finished them when he felt like it. They often looked unfinished, and I was left wondering what if he had kept painting. I remembered that painters like de Kooning, and Auerbach had painted, scraped down, painted and scraped down repeatedly, until they came up with a truly convincing image.                  


His large-scale Abstract Expressionist influenced work from 1994 onwards felt and looked like theater backdrops. Twombly's shadow loomed large in these vast works whose scale washed out any emotional involvement – so much so that I realized that no painter no matter how passionate they were could load such vast canvases with real emotion. I remembered that de Kooning rarely painted on canvases larger than 70" x 80" because that was the limit of his reach.
           

Remember I was a fan of Schnabel's work. However, I had based my knowledge of his work on reproductions. In photographs, his paintings looked more graphic, more incident packed and more powerful all round. In the flesh, they looked more sparsely painted and affected. For all their emotional out pouring - they remained unconvincing. In photographs, I did not see the squandering of paint and reckless use of canvas by a multi-millionaire. Moreover, in the flesh, Schnabel's colours were not emotive like Beckman, de Kooning or Bacon's were. To make matters worse Helen was utterly bored and unimpressed by Schnabel’s work. Her dismissal of his work hit home. One of the first things we had ever done was look at the catalogues on him I owned as we cuddled in bed. At the time, Helen had loved his work and that was one reason I fell in love with her. Now her disinterest in Schnabel seemed to echo her disinterest in me.


Then we went to the Prado for lunch and then strolled around the museum. I was overwhelmed by the Titian’s, Tintoretto’s, Bosch’s, El Greco’s, José Ribera’s, Velázquez’s and Goya’s in the Prado. These various Italian, Flemish and Spanish, artist struck me as the very summit of western oil painting and western oil painting was to me the very summit of human visual culture.                        


Titian was considered by many to be the greatest painter in art history, I could not disagree, though personally I preferred more emotive painters like Rembrandt. Titian's brushstrokes were silvery, shimmering and nuanced. His brushstrokes caressed the flesh of his women. His flesh colours were creamy, grey and blushed. The paint was measured and sat in the grain of his rough canvases. Titian's art was both sensual and refined. He was a man very much in love with people. In Ofrenda a Venus, 1518-19 He painted countless chubby cupids - that were full of life and had a superb faithfulness to anatomy. Children are notoriously difficult to paint but Titian made it look like child’s play – pardon the pun.  In Ticio, 1548-49, Titian created an image of great energy, movement and drama. The eagle was vicious looking and the tumbling and twisting of the body was captured with dynamic but incredibly nuanced brushstrokes. The paint sat in the grain of the rough canvas and seemed to be boldly caressed into the forms. I drew a couple of drawings of Titian’s radiant nudes Danae, 1553 and Venus and an Organ Player, 1545. However Titian’s grace, humanity and mastery - was quite beyond my skills – and my drawings were embarrassingly crude and ugly.
             

Seeing a handful of great Raphael paintings together for the first time I was surprised by their power, grace and beauty. Raphael was the father of academic painting and I (as you know) hated academic art.  But unlike his followers Raphael had a startling grasp of anatomy, colour and all his work glowed from within with a warm humanist light. It was this warm light and humanism that Ingres for example could not emulate. I realised that in rare cases like Raphael, great craftsmanship and technical skill were the product of an almost divine blessing. I did not believe in God but if there was one – I knew the gifts of artists like Raphael were God given. Training and experience could enrich talent but the germ of it was given before birth.
           

Velázquez’s Las Meniñas was a magical painting, flooded with a silvery light. The little Infanta held my rapt attention. She was at once innocent and knowing. All my life when I looked at paintings, I would look at the brushstrokes - imagining I was painting them myself and wonder if I could do better. With Velázquez, I knew that I could live a thousand life times and never reach this kind of perfect touch, registry of tone, or feeling for people. Velázquez's brushstrokes were so full of élan, variety, daring and consummate skill yet at the same time were never showy or overtly emphatic. His colouring was restricted yet full of resonance. His brushstrokes ranged from fluffy and soft to darting and sharp. His mark making was infinite in its variety. Soft and hard, angular and organic his mastery of tone created an extraordinary sense of light and life. I was drawn also to the slightly blurred little dwarf boy Nicolás who was captured in mid movement as he prodded with his foot the old, fat and tolerant dog. Nicolás looked as though caught on camera. These people so different to us never the less breathed the same air and were filled with similar worries. This was Aristocratic Realism at its height! Looking at the work of Velázquez, I was thrilled to the core by the sheer craft and skill of his painting technique which he raised to a level of genius I doubt any other painter has ever achieved. Velázquez gave dignity to everyone in his art, registering their flaws, but never denigrating their character. It was I thought just how we would wish God to look upon us - with compassion, wisdom and forgiveness. However I was not impressed by everything in the Spanish school - I found Murillo a sugary bore.
           

Later we went to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. I was overwhelmed by the brilliance and lively colour of the German Expressionist masters; Kirchner, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluf, and Beckman. I adored the Impressionists paintings of; Manet, Degas, Pissarro, Monet and van Gogh on display as well as the portraits of John Singer Sargent. That night Helen and I had a KFC meal - then we had lovely bottle of red wine in the Circulo de Bellas Artes an artists’ drinking club, which the public for a €1fee could drink in. On the walls hung wonderfully skilled life-drawings from the early 20th century, which I loved. When we got back to the hotel, we smoked joints and I looked through my art books.                


On Friday we went to the Museo Arqueologico, we saw great Roman and Iberian artifacts, but the recreation of the Altamira Caves was closed due to the heat and lack of air-conditioning. Then we went to Café Gijon a famous literary haunt in Madrid were Hemingway was known to have been a drinker. The walls of Café Gijon was lined with drawings and poems by its famous regulars. We had a horrible traditional meal of venison, which the waiter had recommended and ended up costing us €85. Later we went to Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, and saw retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein - which I thought was awful. I had no time for the mechanical, impersonal looking Pop art images of Lichtenstein. Also in the Reina Sofia we saw a large retrospective of important paintings, drawings and collages of Dalí, which we spent over an hour looking through. Seeing Dalí’s early work impressed us more than the later crass work we had seen in Figueres in 1999.                                                                  


In the permanent collection, we saw Picasso's Guernica and his studies for it, as well as many of his other paintings and sculptures. I admired the political significance of Guernica, Picasso’s ability to turn a specific event into a universal statement against war, and the visceral power of his iconography. However, I thought it was little more than a blown up drawing and as an oil painting I thought it had little to recommend it. Although, Guernica as an icon of twentieth century art was unparalleled, as a painting I felt it just did not work. I felt it was compositionally unbalanced.                


While standing in front of Picasso’s Woman in Blue from 1901, an early Toulouse-Lautrec inspired oil of a Madrid lady seated in along dress; I overheard two women discuss the work. “It’s a shame he stopped painting like this!” The educated viewer of modern art in me felt shock at such a reactionary and conservative view of Picasso’s career. Had Picasso spent the rest of his life painting these kinds of society portraits he would have been a total irrelevancy in twentieth century art. Yet, it was true that such work which spoke of beauty and painterly virtuosity that had its own charms. The greatness of Picasso though was his ability to straddle both the old world of classical beauty and ancestral skill and the new world of modernist distortion, formal invention and intellectual playfulness.                                                                                                                             

We also saw a great deal more work by Dalí whose work was declining in my estimation due to his old-fashioned technique and Miró whose paintings and sculptures were assuming greater importance to me due to the more modern and democratic techniques. I saw for the first time in the flesh a large number of paintings by Antoni Tàpies - who was something of a revelation to me. I was very impressed by the material sophistication and richness of Tàpies paintings that was impossible to understand without seeing them. Another discovery for me was the paintings and drawings of Antonio López Garcia whose work haunted my memories for years to come. López was one of those rare realist painters who re-energized observational art.


We stayed in the hotel that night, smoked joints, and relaxed. On Saturday, we went to the Museo de Ciencias Naturales where we saw a great exhibit of dinosaur bones. While Helen read her book outside in a café, I went in and I made some drawings of the stuffed animals. Then we went to the Prado and had lunch outside.                                                                                                          
           

Later I went in to the galleries and drew graphite and coloured pencil drawings from the Titian`s, and José Ribera's. José Ribera’s paintings were some of the ugliest and yet compulsive images I had ever seen in Western art. Many painters had painted scenes of religious martyrs being tortured – but in José Ribera’s hands these scenes took on an almost hellish quality. José Ribera's treatment of skin was earthy, rippled emotional and morbidly sensual. José Ribera painted skin in the shadow of ageing, decay and death. José Ribera was at his best painting old weathered men. But his Mary Magdalene of 1641 was full of warm sympathy, compassion and intelligent love of beauty. José Ribera's brushstrokes were not as flashy a Velázquez or Titian but they were sure, succinct, earthy and sombre. His colour scheme of brown, black, grey, crimson and light blue was as sophisticated as a late George Braque. José Ribera's depiction of men was full of sin and debauchery - you could sense their weight and gravitas.


That night we watched a huge Gay Pride march from our hotel window and then went out and joined the march.  On Sunday we went to the markets, Helen bought clothes, and I purchased an animal hide for €30. Then we went to the Prado and I did more drawings from Goya's Black Paintings. My drawings from Goya's work in the Prado were an attempt to give myself access to Goya's code of nightmares. However, my versions were more Art Brut than Romantic.


Goya’s Black Paintings were a demonic vision that had never the less emerged out of the Rococo training of an enlightenment figure. They were a rebuke to all the dreams of the enlightenment and the good life he had lost. Goya's work had always had an element of caricature, but in the Black Paintings, it reached a fever pitch. Goya's black was applied thick and thin, transparent and opaque and had numerous inflections of grey, green, brown and blue running through it. Goya's brushstrokes in the Black Paintings were worried, brutal, clotted, worked and reworked and yet his old genius and virtuosity underpinned it all. They were like screams of measured and skilfully articulated complaint. And for me they were one of the most powerful visual documents of the brutal, superstitious, paranoid and animal like aspects of human nature.                                                      


Goya's painting The Dog broke my heart with its humanity. Critics rightly hate cat and dog paintings - they are usually sentimental and kitsch. But Goya's dog was full of pathos and refined understatement. Was the dog drowning, or looking for its master? There was more pathos in this painting of a dog than I had seen in hundreds of crucifixions. It was a heart-rending image - especially for a dog lover like me.


On our way back to the hotel, we had a glass of wine in the Circulo de Bellas Artes. At the hotel, we watched the Euro 2004 final and saw Greece beat Portugal. On Monday, we went back to the Julian Schnabel exhibition, and I took notes on the paintings in my sketchbook. Then we went to the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and while Helen sat outside, I looked around for an hour and a half. On our way back to the hotel we dropped in again to the Circulo de Bellas Artes and had a glass of wine.
         

That night Helen and I had a huge fight, she said that she had been expecting me to propose to her in Madrid. She told me she could not stick my selfishness any longer and she thought we would have to break up. I was frankly stunned, since I had no idea she had expected a proposal and my head was only full of the art in Madrid. Looking back now, I can see how self-centered I was - but I also know I could not have changed. Helen knew that too. We had grown apart as people. We wanted different things from life. My rejection by NCAD had not broken me – but rather driven me further to prove them all wrong. Helen wanted children, marriage and financial security – and I cannot blame her for that. Even I knew it might be decades before I could support a family. I still only lived to become a great artist.


We went to sleep still mad with each other. The following day we made up – but it was a truce not a real peace. We went to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza had another quick look around and then got a taxi to the airport. Our flight was delayed and we had to hang around the airport for four hours. We arrived back in Dublin at 1:30am on Tuesday 7th July, and went straight to bed. The memories of this last happy holiday with Helen would haunt me every night, before I fell asleep, for over a year.