The Yellow House

"I used to be too subjective, and I was always tempted to find my inner self in the exterior and dissipate my imagination on other people and on life."

Oskar Kokoschka

Later that month I watched with great trepidation The Yellow House on C4. I was nervous, because if any artist was more in danger of being caricatured by a film it was Vincent van Gogh. Already the premises of the book and this film based on the book irked me - why isolate just this nine weeks stay of Paul Gauguin with van Gogh probably because it’s the most sensational part of the van Gogh story - when he cut the lobe of his left ear off after a fight with Gauguin. Besides, although art critics have sometimes laughed at it, I was so familiar with the great Hollywood film Lust for Life, which covered the whole of van Gogh's creative life and had great central performances from Kirk Douglas as Vincent and Anthony Quinn as Paul. I hardly imagined that Lust For Life could be bettered by this new film and it was not. I had never bothered reading Martin Gayford book of the same name, for the simple fact of van Gogh fatigue. I mean I adored him, his art, and his writings, but enough was enough! After all, there were plenty of other artists whose stories would have made good movies.

In a sense, the nine weeks Vincent and Paul spent together were atypical in van Gogh's story. He was a profoundly lonely man who spent most of his adult life in isolation, in one run down room over a cafe, after another - 37 different places in total. He probably suffered from manic depression compounded by epilepsy, absinthe poisoning, frantic over work and malnutrition. He wandered, he painted, he drew, he read, and he wrote incessantly seeking salvation in his art.  But perhaps because of his isolation he had always dreamed of an artist’s community, where he could work together with other like minded artists on the project of late Impressionism. Vincent hoped that Gauguin would just be the first artist to join him in Arles. The trouble was that as characters they were an explosive combination. Gauguin was sinister, manipulative and domineering while van Gogh was passive-aggressive, argumentative and needy. They had met before in Paris many times, usually near the art supply shop of Pere Tanguy, where Tanguy showed artists paintings he had received in receipt of art supplies. At this time, van Gogh was still trying to find himself in a variety of sub Impressionist experimentation's. Gauguin on the other hand had slowly but surely started evolving his own very private style in Brittany. However when Gauguin walked off the train and saw Vincent's recent efforts he was walking in to a full-scale revolution in art. Seeing the huge number of canvases that Vincent had made in less than a year must have been gob smacking. However, Gauguin defended his own self-esteem by attacking Vincent’s slap dash approach to painting. Paul took on a tutor’s attitude towards Vincent, trying to get him to paint from memory, slowly and with consideration. 


As artists, they were in many ways opposites. Gauguin would in his later years in the South Seas, produce highly coloured exotic nudes that were built on a drawn foundation handed down from Ingres and Degas - they were modern and primitive and yet also strangely classical. Gauguin thought deeply about his paintings, and painted them slowly, often over years. Van Gogh on the other hand was all about capturing the moment. He painted in a frenzy, which had an inner logic of its own, and he described his best paintings pouring out in feverish bursts. But there was far more intelligence in van Gogh's manic painting than one might imagine, and despite Gauguin's classical leanings there was far more of a whiff of sulphur about his work - he was a decadent familiar with drugs, whores, drink and later underage Tahitian girls. 

Of course, the high moment came when after they had a fight, Gauguin stormed off and Vincent cut off his left ear and then handed it in a letter to a girl in the local brothel. This was just the latest in a series of what today would be called 'self-harming episodes' in Vincent's life and it would not be his last - that was when 18 months later he shot himself in the chest and died a day later. The best explanation I have heard about this episode, is that Vincent would go to the bullfights in the local arena and saw the way the matador's cut the ear of the bull off as a trophy. In cutting his ear off, Vincent was acknowledging Gauguin as the victor of their psychic battle of wills. However, it was also typical of a passive aggressive man boiling with rage, but who could not bring himself to strike out at another man so turned upon himself - the man he truly hated. However, he cut his ear lobe off - not his painting hand! He was not that beaten! 


Therefore, you would expect that with material like this, any drama could not lose. Well 'The Yellow House' bombed. Over acted, under-acted, theatrical, tedious and laughable at times - this film was rubbish. I did not believe a word of it, even when I heard them quote directly from their letters. The lowbrow nature of this film was summed up at the end when they told us that the 40 paintings they made together are now worth $1.5 Billion. So Fucking What! What in God’s name does that tell us about their work or the meaning of their lives! Just another example of the way the capitalistic, consumerist, and celebrity-driven culture of the devoured all higher meanings and shitted it out as sound bite adverts for consumption, capital and fame. The fact of the matter was that Paul and Vincent were just two among many artists, thinkers, socialists, philosophers, decadents, and writers in the late nineteenth century who imagined a better world, one driven by higher morals, shared wealth, and belief in the power of art to change the world. They may have been wrong or naïve, but they had principals. This was part of the barrier to the modern worlds understanding of them and their art. The kids on the ramparts in Paris in 1968 were the last people to understand these men. 


Neither John Simms as Vincent nor John Lynch as Gauguin, had any understanding of them. Neither of them had the volcanic and tortured personalities to live up to their parts.  If alive in 2007, Gauguin might have been in prison for paedophilia, and van Gogh would have been on lithium, unable to paint. But we still had their art and their example.

The Minefield of the Nude

In early July all my thoughts centred around Modigliani whose work was being shown in London. I got every review on the exhibition I could find in the papers or on line. I also re-read my many books on Modigliani. As you know, Modigliani had been one of my all time hero's since the age of 16. Quite apart from his dramatic debauched life - his love of poetry and philosophy - I had loved his art. I had only seen a handful of his paintings in various galleries around the world - but never a major retrospective. However, those individual paintings I had seen were scared on my memory and thrilled me with their beauty, colour, rich paint and elegance. So I was shocked by the dismissal of his art by most critics, who called his work weak, over stylized, and pornographic. His nudes - which I found truly beautiful and not at all sexual, came in for the greatest amount of criticism. Yes his nudes were smouldering erotic - yes they seem to have had a sleepy post-coital sensuality - but I didn't see them as exploitative or abusive. I felt they were poems to love in paint made by a man who loved women and who women loved. But it seemed that the greatest crime Modigliani committed in an age of modernist innovation was to retain a love for the old masters, and the figure in a century when many artists escaped into abstraction and conceptualism.

As I thought about it I was struck by how often I had read vicious reviews of artists who painted the nude - for example Picasso, Schiele, and Freud. And many of these vicious reviews did not just come from reactionary Feminists (in fact women on the whole in my experience were far more comfortable with the nude and the sexual than men and it was no coincidence that many of the greatest writers on the nude, the erotic and even the pornographic had been women.) 


The fact of the matter was - the nude in art was a minefield! I could count on one hand the number of critics who had openly acknowledged the sexiness of a nude. In fact, the nude, the erotic and the pornographic were subjects of intense disgust for most art critics. Remember in many ways the critic was more of a politician and social mover than an artist. They sought respect and power through their 'refined taste and judgment.' So much of what they wrote was political not personal. The last thing they want was to let people know their dirty little sexual peccadilloes. The artist on the other hand - if they were great artists - exposed to the world their inner soul. It might so happen that their inner soul was perverted, or cruel or misogynist - but that's the risk the artist took. It was not a risk the critic ever made. The nude and the sexual should in theory have been subjects that brought people together in celebration of the human, but in fact the opposite was the case. Quite apart from the major criticisms of the nude - misogyny, abuse of power, voyeurism, the male gaze, the objectification of the female or male body, homophobia, perversion - there were other many subtle criticisms centred around what was considered - beautiful, uplifting, or just plain normal. 


In a sense, this should not be surprising, because the human subject provoked human interpretations. Depending upon the viewer almost any reading was possible of a nude. This was what made the nude quite the most difficult of subjects. Because as humans, we know human body's far more intimately that any other subject moreover we have far more intellectual and emotional responses to the nude that we simply could not summon for a picture of a landscape or a still-life. The nude even in photography, was never just a neutral subject and the part of the artist was never just artistic. Every artist brought different feelings to bear on the subject. Often peoples disgust with a nude was not about the nude - but how it had been seen an interpreted by the artist. 


The beauty of the history of art was the sheer variety of interpretations of the nude - both male and female. Starting with the beautiful fat Venus of Wilendorf - which could be read as misogynistic and cruel, or fantastic and celebratory of women. The pencil-thin nudes of Cranch which were both voyeuristic and strangely reminiscent of all my present day anorexic celebrities. Then there were those beautiful full figures of Ruben's, which thrilled me but disgusted many in my day simply because people could not believe people ever thought this voluptuousness attractive. Italian art was filled with elegant athletic and angelic female nudes, strapping virile male warriors. And in the last century the nude was dismembered by artists like Picasso and Bacon, coldly analyzed by Freud or sexualized by Schiele and Modigliani. 


Because the nude was so explosive, divisive not to mention technically difficult a subject - it was often avoided in the art of my day. This was a great pity. Because in a world glutted with fashion, glamour, soft-core and hardcore images of the body (mostly female bodies) art should have tried to intellectually and emotionally help us to understand our responses to these images. But art fled in terror. Sex and the nude might have sold everywhere else in the media world - but it did not sell in the art world. So what we had was a sea of images, which exploited our basic instincts of lust, vanity, narcissism, self-loathing, or inadequacy but which offered us no mental escape. Like Pavlovian dogs see responded to the triggers that advertisers and pornographers knew so well how to pull. Whether it was a young woman who thought she was fat, being made to hate herself even more because of the anorexic images of the fashion industry, or the young man being made to buy more and more porn because he was hooked on the high it produced - we were all in a way enslaved. I personally didn't think art was enslaving - I thought it was liberating and one of the greatest ways to find enlightenment. Which was why it was so shocking to see most art alienate us even more with abstractions and theories rather than real human stories and emotion.

Sean Scully and The Bullshit of Hype

On Friday May 5^th 2006, I watched the Irish/English painter Sean Scully being interviewed by Pat Kenny. Sean Scully who had lived in New York for years was being interviewed on The Late Late Show (Ireland's Tonight Show - without the humour and a lot of serious debates) on the eve of the opening of a whole room devoted to his art in the newly expanded Huge Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin. It was a cringe-making interview and in a way I felt sorry for Scully. Serious and I mean really serious big art world artists like Scully do not appear on stupid popular television shows - not only because popular culture does not want them, but because even if they do - serious artists find these kinds of interviews - centred around childish notions of 'genius', 'the greatest artist in the world' and discussion of the ludicrous and vulgar price of their paintings insults the seriousness of the high minded artist. I cringed when Pat Kenny the host of The Late Late Show pointed to one of Scully's abstracts 'Yellow Yellow' and delighted in informing the audience that it was worth €400, 000. I nearly vomited when Barbara Dawson director of the Huge Lane described Scully to Kenny and the audience as 'one of the greatest artists in the world' and 'the greatest abstract painter alive" - pass the fucking bucket! I could have listed a hundred artists alive that were better than Scully and thousands more who were infinitely more interesting to look at.

But I continued to watch and my ears pricked up when Pat tried to get Scully to describe his paintings. I had painted quite a few abstract paintings in my time and I had always found them hard to describe to the common man. So I was eager to hear the feted multi millionaire and art teacher describe his abstract works. What a fucking let down! Scully squirmed in his seat and trotted out bullshit about how Beethoven's music was abstract, how our memories are not literal but in fact abstract and other very lame and unoriginal clichés. Where was the mystical gibberish of Kandinsky or the “I am Nature” intensity of Pollock which were at least more convincing? Scully’s explanations of his abstract art were no more intelligent or convincing than the ramblings of some spotty, sincere teenager. 


Scully had in fact had a blessed existence in the art world - Robert Hughes loved his work - Now I loved Hughes as a critic and a writer - but his judgments concerning contemporary art was depressingly narrow minded - for example Hughes hated Basquiat, Schanbel, Celement, Koons, and Hirst. Part of Scully's success I thought was the aura around Scully the “black belt in karate”, youthful gangster and thug with a painful sincerity about the deep meaning of his paintings made up of rectangles of muted colours butted against each other on expensive French linen canvas stretched on thick 3" stretchers. In an art world of pathetic effete whims that had never had a cat-fight never mind a bar room brawl - Scully was intimidating. Surely someone so imposing, anguished, and sincere was making art of serious import! But he wasn't. He was a lucky chancer who had turned out hundreds of monotonous abstract canvases without any real intellectual invention or for that matter passion. Scully's work told us absolutely nothing about the world in which we lived and was in fact a parasitic reheating of early modernist abstraction - but without any of the spiritual meaning, originality or iconoclastic edge of the originals. 


So why was it that he had come to mean so much in the Irish art world? Because Ireland's art elite was desperate to fabricate a visual tradition for Ireland and would do anything to get it - or fake it. In 2000 the Huge Lane installed the Bacon studio - creating a myth of Bacon's Irishness (Bacon left Ireland at the age of 16 and his parents were English) with Scully they took a man born in Ireland but who grew up and studied in England and had lived as an uber rich art celebrity in England, America, and Germany but never Ireland - and enshrined him as an Irish master! 


Growing up as an artist in the dissolute and dead art world of Dublin in the 1980s-90s was depressing. Real art happened in Paris, Berlin, New York and London, and all we had was magazines like Artforum to inform us of what was going on elsewhere. Even if we didn't believe all the hype and bullshit surrounding art world stars like Beuys, Warhol or Koons - we had no real way of judging for ourselves. Like dogs in a kennel we ate what we were feed and knew no better. How could one judge the quality of Schnabel, Basquiat, or Barney on the basis of a few tiny photos and a few paragraphs of philosophical bullshit in the art magazines? It was impossible! But one of the good things was to live in a country with no vested interest in art. None of us had any part in the fabricating of art myth and were immune to its effects. All that had changed by the turn of the millennium. Ireland wanted its own artistic heritage and with that came the fabrication of myths about artists of very average ability.

Tracey Emin The Feminist Capitalist

“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"

Sigmund Freud

In mid March 2006, I watched What Price Art on channel 4, in which Tracey Emin explored the issue of the prices fetched by women artists in comparison to male artists. In the 1970s courses like Women's Studies propagated endless thesis and later biographies on neglected female artists. Those artists it highlighted Artemisia Gentileschi, Gwen John, Modersohn-Becker, and Frida Kahlo were good third-rate artists but not geniuses - you could easily pick a hundred forgotten male artists just as good if not better. It is a cold fact that the history of art is 99.999% dominated by dead white male western artists. This fact is a subject of intense outrage by people less interested in art and more interested in the gender, race, and religion of artists than in the actual quality of the art they make. In The Obstacle Race Germane Greer studied the history of female artists and concluded that while art history was full of female child prodigies - they never lived up to their early promise. The 1970s and 1980s saw a spate of women only exhibitions, which only further ghettoized women, and since most of the art exhibited was rubbish it did nothing to promote the cause of respect for women artists. Camille Paglia famously declared in Sexual Persona that there would never be a female genius like Mozart because there were not blood-lust killers like Jake the Ripper. Genius like psychopathic blood-lust killing she claimed was a peculiarly male phenomenon. Paglia claimed that feminist excuses for a lack of geniuses - like social neglect, prejudice or motherhood - were irrelevant because many great male artists faced prejudice, neglect, poverty and derision. I thought it was far too early in female emancipation to agree with this. And already many strong female artists had emerged like Louise Bourgeois and Paula Rego. But what really annoyed me about Tracey's utterly self serving and self-obsessed documentary  - was its reduction of art to money  - spawned as it was by her own anger that the likes of Damien Hirst's work sold for higher prices than her own. However, to me it was self evident that Hirst was an infinitely better artist than Emin and more importantly he was a far greater curator and promoter of the London Art scene. As far as I could tell, Emin had done nothing but promote herself and her art relentlessly for the past twenty years. Hirst on the other hand had worked in collaboration with others artists, and began his life as a curator of others artists work. Hirst along with Saatchi and Joplin made the London sense - Tracey just crashed it and screamed for attention.                                                                                                                             

Louis Le Brocquy: The Naked Irish Emperor

At the end of February 2006, I saw a documentary on Louis le Brocquy. He was the richest most celebrated Irish artist of the last 50 years. Due to the Celtic Tiger and collectors who are concerned to look patriotic, his prices are outrageous. In 2000, over one million was spent on a 1950s canvas. Had Le Brocquy been born anywhere else he would have starved on his talents. However, he was Irish and in a country bursting to the rim of world-class writers and musicians he was one of the few old artists of any merit. So ipso facto he was rich and celebrated. To list all the artists he had ripped off to fuel his art would be tedious. In the documentary, he was quick to name a few, but also deadly silent on the key influences - Cézanne, Picasso, Fautrier, Wols, Giacometti and Bacon. The documentary was larded with literary references and illusions - the kind of crap that goes down so well in Ireland where writing was still king. The Poet of the Bog Seamus Heaney cropped up to eulogize every ten minutes - Heaney loved bogger art - the kind of art that relates to an Ireland that died about fifty years ago. Le Brocquy had talent and handled paint with some sophistication. And he could draw with some level of seriousness. But his art was passionless, stilted, plagiarized, and studied into mediocrity. The influences were too obvious, and Le Brocquy added nothing new in terms of subject matter, passion, or design. The list of French and English painters of the 1950s that were better than him would be a long one - Giacometti, Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Stael, Dubuffet, Wols, Atlan, Fautrier, Sutherland - and this at a time when American Artists were supreme. That said, I had never heard a bad word spoken about Le Brocquy as a man. He seemed a supreme diplomat and smoothie - the kind the middle class ladies who lunch adore - an artist with no balls, who is polite and adds just a dash of colour - but not too much colour - that would be impolite.