Louise Bourgeois: The Wicked Little Girl

In the first week of October 2007, I saw on BBC 1 - a very telling documentary on Louise Bourgeois – who at the age of 96 - was generally considered to be the greatest living female artist in the world. In her long career (as long as Picasso’s) Bourgeois had made: Cubist and Surreal oil paintings, Tribal-like wooden towers, marble phallic shaped abstractions, rubber phallus's and breasts, architectural spaces filed with menacing domestic props and symbolic sculptures, embroidered rants, tapestry masks (which cross 18th century French Tapestry design with African masks), giant steel female spiders (their belly's full of eggs), and countless heartfelt, uncanny and symbolic watercolours, drawings and prints. At the time of the documentary Bourgeois was the subject of a major retrospective in Tate Modern in London – it was an exhibition I ached to see – but simply could not get to.

           

However, having seen two exhibitions dedicated to her – the first in The Douglas Hyde Gallery and the second in IMMA - I totally agreed that she was the greatest female artist of my today. Nevertheless, when seen in a wider historical perspective – how good was she really?

           

There was no doubt that Bourgeois had been one of the most influential artists of the previous forty years - especially on female artists. A quick look at the work made by young sculptors from the 1970s onward – revealed just how much of a debt they owed her. You only had to look for example at Kiki Smith in America, Dorothy Cross in Ireland or Tracey Emin in England - not to mention male artists like Damien Hirst. In fact, Bourgeois was the Matriarch of ‘identity-art’ and it’s most complex and intelligent exponent. But Bourgeois did not enjoy this theft of her art – she believed people were robbing her images and ideas – she was right - but it was a bit rich coming from someone who had done the same for most of her life! Her art had an original flavour to it – but like all great art it had been built upon the lessons of art history.

           

Personally, I thought she was up there with the very best hundred and fifty known artists in Western art. There were only a few dozen men or women in the west - who sacrificed so much psychic energy to their art, fought such prejudices and customs and battled so very long for recognition (she was almost seventy-one before her first major retrospective in MoMA in 1982.) However, I thought her work had not reached beyond the third rank of importance – her concerns were too private, to parochial and too baffling to ever have the universal appeal of the likes of Raphael, Monet or Warhol. Moreover, she was far from the premier groundbreaking achievements of Giotto, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso, Duchamp or Dalí.

           

As a female artist – I thought she was the greatest of all time. I identified with her misandry - as a counter weight to my own misogyny. I doubted she would like me and I feared I would crumble in her terrifying presence – but I would still have been tempted to talk with her. I completely identified with her passive-aggressive anger and hostility - and I felt a kinship with her unbreakable creativity. I did not know what it was like to be a little girl afraid of her father and wanting to be a man. But I did know what it was like to be a little boy afraid of my mother and wanting to be a woman! I instinctively understood her fragmented icons, her torn words, her wounded ego, her tortured and Janus faced sexuality, and her inner battle of self. I greatly admired her intellect and sound knowledge of art history and found her captivating in interviews, take for example this great quote from her: “I want revenge for being born, I want apologies, I want blood, I want to do to others what has been done to me. To be born is to be ejected, to be abandoned – therein lies the fury.” I could not have put it better myself!

           

Bourgeois at her very best – was often revoltingly ugly – lodging panic into men and turning the stomach of many women. The nasty edge to her work put off traditional art lovers who much preferred the pure beauty and genteel femininity of Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe and Helen Frankenthaler or the ironic detachment of Cindy Sherman. Even Frida Kahlo’s paintings were more inviting to the viewer – for she often made pain look stylish and brave.

           

Of course notions of the Western Canon like this were both ignorant of other cultures and the anonymous work of thousands of craftsmen and women throughout time - who have fashioned masterpieces without the conceit that artists after Giotto in the West have been plagued by. Just one quick example of a hardly known great non-western female artist was Lei (sister of the devout Emperor Shun in China) - reputed to be the mother of Chinese painting – a fact much lamented by the men who came after her to take over this art form.

           

Typically in the West, the mediums and subjects of female art – embroidery, tapestries, flower arranging, still-life's or maternity scenes have been denigrated as inferior art forms – while their attempts to become painters and sculptors have been handicapped by hostility masked as morality. Many female artists were restricted to the role of happy amateurs painting at home. Others who tried to make a career for themselves were blocked from the life-class, often expected to stop making art once married and certainly after having children - and their subjects restricted to the domestic scene. Which was not to say that there had not been highly successful female artists in the Western tradition – just look at Angelica Kauffmann or Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun in the seventeenth century. However even in the 1940s an artist like Lee Krasner willingly put her own career on hold – to promote the work of her husband Jackson Pollock. Thus the handicraft of women in particular had been written out of history – and this unspoken injunction against female artists - is what Bourgeois attacked head on in her work. Like a demented child tearing apart a toy soldier - she sought to deconstruct the masculine edifice and replace it with a feminine presence. One of her key strategies being the use of needlepoint, stitching and embroidery to deliver witty and sarcastic observations on the human body.

           

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. Her father had wanted a boy. Bourgeois maybe wanted to be a boy herself – she certainly grew up resentful of male authority and the restricted ambitions and potential for little girls. She struck me in interviews as a kind of insane Katharine Hepburn type character – fiery, tempestuous, rebellious and wickedly funny – but with a very soft, tender and hurt hidden side.

           

According to Bourgeois – her father was a tyrant, quick to physically discipline, given to prolonged monologues and rants at the dinner table and worst of all betraying Louise’s mother by carrying on with the child’s live-in Governess. Worse still, her mother accepted this unofficial menage-a-trois – leaving Louise betrayed three times over.

           

Some cynics like Brian Sewell had asked whether her childhood warranted such an exhaustive, lengthy and repetitious exploration. So what if her father was a patriarchal philanderer – he provided her with a relatively stable home, Coco Channel dresses, trips to Cannes and paid for her expensive and privileged education. Personally, I thought it crass to question Bourgeois source of pain – maybe she had exaggerated it in her art, but that was one of the main functions of the artist – to magnify the everyday.

           

However perhaps the worst thing that Louise’s father did - was to be so very like herself. Since the 1970s Bourgeois had held a Salon - in her run down home (its rooms crammed with her work and it’s walls covered in her rants and cries of pain) in New York - with the art critic Robert Storr. At such gatherings, young artists came to show them their work - and she pressed them for the meaning of it all. “But why did you want to make that?” Seemed to be her most common question. Seeing her at her Salon I could not help wonder at the purpose and value of such sessions for those artists foolish enough to bring themselves to her. Perhaps if you were also an artist interested in auto-biographical art – they might have had some value – but to a formalist they would have be utterly useless. Fundamentally, I believed that for little Louise - who had been forced to sit and listen powerlessly to her father and other men like the Surrealist rant on – it was a chance to take to the head of the table in later life.

           

Her family was prosperous and her childhood was at least materially privileged. She grew up in a large elegant Paris house - which she was to later recreate in highly detailed scaled models - the most telling one (Cell (Choisy), 1990-1993) a large marble version in a cage with a guillotine perched over it – ready to slice it in half. Houses for Bourgeois - became cages for repression, betrayal, frustration, fear, longing and pain.                                                                                             

Her mother and father mended tapestries - so from any age Bourgeois worked with them learning the ancient skills of the loom. Some of the tapestries that they mended - contained nude nymphs and Goddesses – their owners felt embarrassed by the nudity in such works and requested that the genitals be covered up. So one of little Louise’s first jobs was to help her parents sew little bunches of grapes or fig leafs over the genitals! This crass desecration of art by ignorant philistines - probably lead to her rebellious construction of phallic and vulva sculptures in the late 1960s.

           

At the age of fifteen, she studied mathematics in the Sorbonne in Paris, and her grounding in geometry informed her early Cubist paintings. In her late twenties Bourgeois trained in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and then worked in the studios of Bissiere and the great Cubist painter Fernand Leger. It was Leger who convinced her that her real talent lay in sculpture. He was right – she never had any real painterly gift – her paintings tend to be naïve, graphic, and linear – more interesting for their potential realization in the third dimension than for their brushwork, colour or painterly texture.

           

In the 1920s she hung around the Surrealists– but her hackles rose when they treated her as just another bit of skirt – according to her they were misogynistic men and the only women they cared for were either sluts or rich society women who would buy their art. When she said that Marcel Duchamp was like her father – it was not a compliment!

           

A year before the outbreak of World War Two - Bourgeois escaped to New York – with her new husband Robert Goldwater a reputable art historian and specialist on African art. She said he was more like her mother than her father – a real compliment in her book! Bourgeois intently fell in love with the American metropolis - she admired its scale, its ambition, its tolerance, its multi-culturalism and its greater freedom for women. I was also sure she chuckled at the gross phallic posturing of Manhattan's sky-scrappers.

           

No doubt, Goldwater and Bourgeois spent many a long hour talking about primitive art and its importance in Modern art. The out-standing biographer John Richardson in ‘Picasso a Life’ volume two (1997) described perfectly the Spaniards search for ‘the-sacred-fire’. Picasso found it in African art – which although technically brutal, simplistic and crude – exploded with psychic energy, feeling and Voodoo. I think Bourgeois found the same thing in Tribal art – but it took her decades to move beyond mere imitation of its form into a true expression of its feeling.

           

In 1949, she gave up painting and became a full time sculptor – she was thirty-eight. The fact is that Bourgeois was a late developer – her first sculptures in New York – her so called Skyscraper works were far too indebted to Brancusi, Picasso and Tribal art. She was still using other men's grammar and other men's forms. Despite the fact that MoMA bought one of her sculptures from her 1947 show – her work was ignored by the New York art world of the 1950s and 1960s. In an art market dominated by macho Abstract-Expressionism, cynical Pop art, over theorized Post-Painterly Abstraction, and pious Hard-Edged Abstraction – Bourgeois’ work looked retarded, ugly and the work of a crazy outsider.

           

Bourgeois created her first undoubted masterpiece Fillette (Little Girl) in 1968 while still largely ignored. Made of battered latex - it looks like a mangled and abused horse-sized dildo complete with balls. It is a truly ugly and compelling work – a misandristic assault on the male genitalia – made by a woman sick of sitting in silence, while men postured around her. However after a third or fourth look – one finds in it and other phallic images by her - a suppressed and surprising tenderness and tongue in cheek black humour. It is telling that she carried it under her arm like an umbrella at her triumphant MoMA show in 1982!

           

In my experience women are fascinated by penises and their responses range from; fear, disgust, contempt, hysteria, hilarity, affection, love - and uncontrollable lust. Bourgeois managed to punctuate her phallic objects with all these emotions – sometimes within a single piece. She also linked aspects of the phallus with elements of the female body – by turns making it look like a breast, a torso, an udder or some strange growth.

           

It was only in the early 1970s that her work began to gain wider influence amongst a new generation of artists and feminist concerned with issues Bourgeois had been exploring for decades – identity, the body, gender and patriarchal structures. Now I had repeatedly attacked the rise of Feminist historians and their hyping of mediocrities like Gwen John and Tamara de Lempicka – but we can at least be thankful that they discovered and promoted Bourgeois – though she herself remained a loner belonging to no school.

           

Her breakthrough into greatness coincided with the death of her father and her beloved Robert – which plunged her into a “fantastic depression” – her words and I think they are telling. She doubted that she had earned her new-found respect - and could not sleep at night. Joseph Beuys another truly great Shaman of the twentieth century had a similar breakthrough after a prolonged ‘fantastic’ depression. These were not depressions of collapse – they were depressions of liberation. It is strange to note that the Portuguese's Paula Rego – another great female artist (equally interested in the complexes of the family) should have also produced some of her greatest works since her husband’s death.

           

Like a woman with absolutely nothing to gain or lose – Bourgeois began to create her greatest masterpieces – redolent with isolation, sexual anger and autobiographical staging. Moreover, as her work hit its stride – her newfound finances, assistants and curatorial support gave her the freedom to create ever more complex, ambitious and vast constructions. The fact is that success in art breeds success – each sale helps fund the following more ambitious projects. I sense that Bourgeois had been waiting for this moment all her life – and she threw herself into it joyfully – like a patient who meets her Park Avenue therapist at a party and unburdens herself for five hours without spending a penny.

           

In the mid 1980s Bourgeois began making her ‘cells’ – semi-architectural spaces in which she installed ambiguous and menacing objects some found - some crafted. Edward Kienholz may have influenced her – but there was a Freudian and Symbolic overtone to her work that made it her own. Bourgeois by now had little interest in nature - apart from the meat of flesh and the animal fears of the family. Her work became increasingly autobiographical and drawn from painful memories of her childhood in France. Her work re-staged the most private and traumatic episodes of her life in such an unpalatable way that viewers often flinched away.

           

In 1993, she represented American at the Venice Biennale, and in 1999, she was the first artist to fill the vast Turbine hall in Tate Modern. Which she did with did with three vast observation towers that the viewer mounted via a curving stair at the top of which were seats winged by large parabolic mirrors. Adjacent to the towers and spanning the Turbine Bridge was huge thirty-five feet high Spider sculpture (Maman now outside the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa) – looming over the viewer protectively or threateningly according to your view point. Of course, Bourgeois was only responsible for the drawing and planning of such vast sculptural works – assistants and foundries did most of the brute work – but unlike other artists of this approach – Bourgeois managed to infuse such ‘factory-made’ work with genuine magic.

           

I had seen her in interviews many times over the years and could not think seeing a more intimidating or sour looking woman in all my life (apart maybe from my mother when ill.) I was reminded of Kate Nash’s song Foundations: “You said, I must eat so many lemons, because I am so bitter. I said I’d rather be with your friends mate, because they are much fitter!” In fact, Bourgeois’ bitterness and black humour was refreshing in an art world full of namby-pamby, hippies - trying to commune with nature or the Earth Goddess.  Bourgeois like the brilliant Post-Feminist Camille Paglia – held no such Utopian notions of femininity – she was as terrified by the chthonian nightmare as by the patriarchal daydream. Paglia tellingly described in (Sexual Persona, 1990, P.5-6) Western Civilizations fear of the chthonian thus: “Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood… The Dionysian is no picnic. It is the chthonian realities, which Apollo evades, the blind grinding of subterranean force, the long slow suck, the murk and ooze. It is the dehumanizing brutality of biology and geology, the Darwinian waste and bloodshed, the squalor and rot we must block from consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons.”

           

Perhaps in October 2007 - Brian Sewell was right when he wrote in The London Evening Standard: “Her work is enthusiastically exhibited only because she is, or pretends to be, a woman who hates men. This is political correctitude gone mad: the work of any male sculptor who did with female genitals what she has done with the penis would never see the light of day and, regarded as a psychopathic danger to society, nor would he.”

           

As a male artist of this kind of ilk – I could testify to the truth of his statement, but if the art world could grant the likes of Picasso, the right to his misogyny - then it had to grant Bourgeois the right to her misandry.

           

Personally, I believed art was an arena in which artists could battle with their demons - safe in the knowledge that the only detrimental effect on society – was offending a few narrow minded prudes. Even if Bourgeois did hate men (which I doubted) at least she had the courage and honesty - to let everyone into the anti-chamber of her fears. I did not believe that repression or lies could ever be a cure for mental instability – so the artist had a duty to express the unexpressed. In fact many women have feelings of hatred towards men and many men have feelings of hatred towards women – but what was more damaging to society I thought than these fears and prejudices – was their unspoken and unreflective promotion of acts of cruelty and injustice.

Alice Maher and Ellen Gallagher

In October 2007, I saw - two important exhibitions of art by women in Dublin. Usually I would not even bother going to these - but Carol as an art student naturally loved female artists. Apart from a few decent artists like Kahlo, O'Keeffe, Bourgeois, Rego, Emin and Gallagher - I had no real interest in women's art. Their concerns were not my concerns, their styles are not my favourites and their over-hyped political promotion made me sick. However, I didn't hate their work anymore than that of 99% of all the male artists I knew.

           

I am had by now become reluctant to write about these shows because I either felt fatigued at the prospect - or I was worried about the knee-jerk emails from women in response to my personal opinions and jokes. In my experience my readers would listen to me berating male artists work for pages - but if I said boo to a female artist – in their eyes I was a meat eating, war mongering, racist and misogynist. It was all so juvenile, humourless and the product of self-interest - for me ever to respond to these attacks.

             

If there was a theme running through my whole writing on art it at this time – it was a belief that there was such a thing as great art - usually because of history that meant male artists - but every year - more and more genuinely great female artists were emerging. On Internet sites like deviantart and mypace - I had found far more talented up and coming female artists than men - in fact, it was a eight to two ratio. Moreover I adored that fact that my girlfriend was such a talented and passionate graphic designer and by then a fine art student - and I loved being able to give her advice and support her art. There was no sex war in our house we both thought it all a joke.

             

So anyway on the first weekend of October - I went with my girlfriend to The National Gallery of Ireland - were we saw a wonderful exhibition of portrait drawings. Gems by Antonio Pollaiuolo, Francesco Bonsignori, Jean-Dominique Ingres, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Adolf Menzel, Augustus John and William Orpen and Paul Klee delighted us both. This was real drawing, real art and real skill and imagination at work. However, I could not say the same for the Alice Maher's exhibition of charcoal and pencil drawings at the RHA.

             

The Night Garden by Maher - was an exhibition inspired by Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. Maher had been exhibiting in Ireland and abroad since the 1990s - to some minor success.

             

Putting aside the smug hubris of this woman to think herself an interpreter of Bosch - the show was poster and wallpaper art of the most boring and contrived kind. I was sure she was a lovely woman, I was sure she was sincere, I was sure she was very clever - but a true artist born to create? I thought not. I thought art was merely an easy social option for her. She had talent - but no real originality or passion. It was all too similar to the art made by countless female professors of fine art in art schools across the Western World - dry, derivative, smug, and myopic.

             

As usual, her work was well made, well meaning, diligent but utterly lacking even a flicker of the-sacred-fire. There was no mystery or originality in Maher’s work - just cliché. Her black and white drawings in charcoal and the various works inspired by them seemed far too similar to the greater and more original drawings of Francesco Clemente who had practically reinvented the symbolic figure in Western art in the late 1970s (after a prolonged silencing of the language of the body by abstract art and conceptualism.) However, Maher's work had none of the beauty or enigma of the Italian. Once again Maher's work struck me as academic, contrived and riddled with a rag-bag of Feminist art clichés (long female hair, animals, breasts, breast feeding, menstruation, the moon, the sun, plant forms and so on) derived from more original and heartfelt artists like Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Eva Hesse, Nancy Spero Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois. It was looking at works like these that made me quite happy not to write for a newspaper - and be forced to write about artists like Maher.

             

You know I saw the original Bosch painting in the Prado in 2004 - it is big (it’s about eight feet high and seven and a half feet wide when it is side panels are closed over) and it had burned into my very soul and set my pulse racing. It is quite simply one of the greatest paintings I have ever seen. Bosch’s depiction of male and female nudes is skilful and delightful, his painting of animals entrancing, his musical instruments and grotesque but stylish monsters enigmatic, his colours are so strong and evocative, and the whole panel teems with minute details and beasts conjured from his imagination. A man or woman could sit and look at this painting for an hour a day till they died - and still find new mysteries, details and insights. It took me a brisk walk around of ten minutes to drain Maher's work of all its aesthetic interest. The Bosch painting was an Atom-Bomb of a painting still radiating after nearly five centuries - in contrast Maher's brand-new vast charcoal work (taking up practically the whole of the RHA) was an unexploded dud!

            

Then on the bank holiday weekend at the tail end of October - we went to Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane to see Coral Cities - an exhibition of paintings, collages and craved paper by Ellen Gallagher. Carol was a huge fan of Gallagher's work since it had so many elements of collage in it - for it was my girlfriend’s first love.

             

However, I went with my critical dagger drawn ready to cut her down to size. I suspected that Ellen Gallagher - a beautiful mixed race American (her mother Irish American her absent father an African American) was nothing more than a mascot for a politically correct art world - more concerned with identity than artistic quality. Add to that the growing tendency of Irish museums to rope in any major artist abroad with the vaguest link to Ireland - and you might understand my scepticism.

             

When I had seen her work in reproduction it had looked like timid, boring, art-school stuff. But I had never had a chance to see her work in reality - and that I was soon to learn - was crucial to judging Gallagher's art.

             

As we entered the first room, my heart sank as I looked around and saw large apparently blank white sheets of watercolour paper. However, as I got up close to them my heart jumped for joy. She had cut and carved into the paper - creating highly detailed and well-drawn (or well-carved) images of fish, octopuses and African women's heads with wild flowing hair. In my experience, there are few artists whose work reproduces so badly in print. That is no reflection on the skills of her photographers - merely an indication of how subtle her effects are.

             

These works were quite simply some of the most beautiful, gentle, inventive and skilled contemporary work on paper I have seen in years. I had such a compelling desire to gently run my fingers over her carved, cut, water-coloured and collaged works on high quality watercolour paper. I wanted to share a drink with her - and just listen to her talk. Like a great flirt - Gallagher knew how to say just enough to gain your interest - and had the control to leave you waiting in baited breath - for more.

             

If you wanted me to get heavy handed - I could have said that work dealt with themes of African American women's desire to look white or the subtle forms of self-racism the oppressed sometimes inflict upon themselves. However, that would make her work sound too rhetorical and aggressive. Looking at her work, I was reminded of the wise and softly spoken poetry of Mya Angelo - not the aggressive heroics of Jean-Michel Basquiat or the Feminist screaming of The Guerrilla Girls.

             

Some art works shout at you - Gallagher's whisper to you: "Come here I want to tell you a secret.” Her work reminded me of Georgian flower and plant watercolours, Outsider art, Marlene Dumas watercolour nudes, Chris Ofili's intricately patterned and collaged paintings and many other female artists interested in natural forms and female identity like Nancy Spero. However, at no time did I feel she was pastishing or plagiarizing others - her own vision was consistent throughout. Yes, her art was identity art - but she had so much more to say about life than just what colour her skin was. I quickly sheathed my weapon and bowed in homage.

             

Gallagher's work had a wonderfully obsessive and secretive quality. There was none of the tedious narcissism of Tracey Emin, none of the boring repetition of Rachel Whiteread, none of the bogus Feminist rant of Barbara Kruger or Jenny Holzer and none of the attention seeking of well - take your pick of exhibitionist female artists of my day. Although Gallagher had private schooling and a fairly easy road to the top of the New York art world (in 1995 she was shown in the Whitney Biennial - aged only thirty - and two years later she was a Gagosian artist) I felt her art was truly self-driven and not reliant on the world around her - I knew that success or failure would not stop her need to create.

             

After we had gone around the show once - Carol pleaded: "Do you want to go around again?" "Yes sure!" I replied. So we looked over the work afresh - still enthralled by this wonderful woman's discrete and highly skilled works. Was she a great artist up there with the best of the past twenty years - I thought so - but then that didn’t really say much. These days were truly awful times for contemporary art.  However, I looked forward to watching her understated and very intelligent and compassionate art develop.

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.