Haring exhibition shows what 'pop art' can be

Untitled (Apartheid) 1984

It’s not uncommon to visit an exhibition and find something that you didn’t expect. More rarely, though, is visiting an exhibition that goes way beyond the unexpected and offers something revelatory.

The Keith Haring exhibition, which opened last month at Tate Liverpool, is in the latter category.

Knowing I would be in Liverpool for a week for work, I’d done my usual and checked what was on art wise in the city.

There was an exhibition of Charles Rennie MacIntosh at the Walker (on until 26 August), but it’s a push to get the time, during a particularly intense working week, to get that ‘far’ from the conference centre.

Mickey Mouse eyes

However, the Haring exhibition was scheduled to have just opened at the Tate, which is only a short walk away from where I would be working, so it was a simple matter of remembering to pack my Tate membership card.

I was familiar with Haring’s simple figures – pop art’s answer to Lowry’s stick figures. In the 1980s, you couldn’t miss them – they were ubiquitous.

But context can make all the difference.

Here, we see works from the very beginning of Haring’s all-too-short career: the early Mickey Mouse cartoon eyes and examples of the drawings that Haring, with a deep belief in art being for everyone, executed on paper stuck up in New York Metro stations.

On a personal note – God, I remember drawing those eyes myself. Since, I’ve remembered how I drew and then drew again Mickey Mouse and more off the Disney icons.

But setting such personal memories aside, these are interesting enough and show his style evolving, but what really starts to resonate is later works.

Silence = Death

Haring rarely titled his works, so the only guideline to what he wanted to say is mostly on the surface he worked on – and his ‘canvases’ ranged from the yellow hood of a New York taxi to squares of tarpaulin.

While I knew that Haring had died of AIDS-related causes – and had, late in his life, campaigned around HIV/AIDS – I had not been aware that his political awareness had begun far earlier and went far beyond that.

Perhaps the best example of the HIV/AIDS works is 1989’s Silence = Death, a moving combination of the pink triangle and the idea of ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’.

But in terms of wider political awareness, there are works here that specifically speak out against apartheid in South Africa, while others examine the links between money and war.

An A5 page of my studies from The Matrix

Even more fascinating – and complex – are Haring’s works exploring new technologies. Intrigued by the possibilities offered by growing computerisation, the artist was also aware that there could be downsides.

It’s been suggested that Haring’s line can be compared to Picasso’s, but in it’s effortless, it reminds me more of Matisse – and indeed, many of the later works have a decorative quality, created out of densely-packed glyphs, that is pure Matisse too.

And as glyphs, they also have a sense of continuing a form of human expression that is millennia old.

The vast (and unusually titled) The Matrix, from 1983, seems at first almost abstract: it needs attention to understand anything it, so densely is it packed with ideas.

A day after my visit I returned in a lunch break, complete with sketchbook and pens. Trying to replicate some of the figures is a great way to more fully appreciate the sureness of Haring’s line.

Untitled, 1983

But back to the complexity of technology. Could aliens save us – or slaughter us? Will technology enslave us? Will we end up fucking computers or being fucked by them?

Things here are not necessarily as obvious as they seem. The last works displayed are Boschian in their nightmare view.

Equally interesting are works such as No Sin ... run off on printers, yet interestingly designed and with an eye to mass communication of an idea. 

This is the first exhibition of Haring’s work in the UK.

It’s a revelatory experience: work that built upon pop culture and pop art – Haring might have been the successor to Warhol and Lichtenstein, but he was far more grounded in the community in which he lived and worked, and in political struggle, while he also believed in art for all.

Untitled, 1984 –  no doubt a Boschian hell, though

While I have seen little Warhol and only a small Lichtenstein exhibition (ironically, at Tate Liverpool a year or so ago), I would suggest that Haring was streets above both of them.

In his work, there are what now seem prophetic questions about the nature of technology.

While the last stage of his career was bound up with his own struggle with HIV/AIDS, there is no self-pity and no mawkishness anywhere, but a boisterous sense of joy that is present in every line he executed.

In his work, Haring often dealt with death and the means – or potential means of it. Yet ultimately, this is a life-affirming journey: his work bows to nobody and no god. It is out, it is not ashamed and it is most avowedly concerned with equality for all

It is on until November and is well worth a visit.

Keith Haring is on at Tate Liverpool until 10 November. Find out more here.

Creating still life – art in process

I live in a very small flat – with one Other Half and three cats – and this really is the main space that I have in which to create art. It’s essentially why I aim to produce original, small art for small homes – I know what living in a small space actually means!

And that’s also why my process for still life paintings is to photograph the subjects – and then paint from the screen you see here: I simply don’t have the room to set up a still life and then paint from ‘life’.

The roll of felt is used as my background because it absorbs the light rather than reflecting it back, as black card does, for instance, and I like painting modern subjects in a way that nods toward a more classical look. I love Rembrandt’s dramatic use of light and dark for a reason.

I do, however, have a plastic crate in which I keep basics with which I can create still life works. After seeing Matisse in the Studio at the Royal Academy last year, I realised that I was doing what he had done, collecting bits and pieces and then using them in photos, paintings or drawings.

For that reason, I call it my Matisse Box, because it echoes how one of my personal household gods carried ceramics and fabrics and more around with him to set dress paintings. Indeed, it inspired me to put these odds and ends together and to collect more.

This is a time-lapse of creating a still life for a painting.

The resulting painting hasn’t been done yet, but when it has been, it – together with others – will be available to buy at www.etsy.com/uk/shop/SmARTartByAmanda.

Picasso 1932: a fascinating insight into the artist's mind

The Dream

For Pablo Picasso, 1932 was a tumultuous year. Famous and wealthy he might have been, but at 50, with his marriage to Olga Khokhlova on the rocks and already in a secret relationship with 22-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter, he was also restless.

Playing with surrealism at the same time as trying to best Henri Matisse in the colour stakes, it’s little wonder that his critics were questioning his ability to develop new work.

“The work that one does is a way of keeping a diary,” Picasso was quoted in L’Intransigeant as saying, that June, when his first major retrospective opened.

Tate’s new exhibition, Picasso 1932, takes on this one year in the artist’s life as a way of exploring his evolution as an artist at such a crucial stage of his career.

We begin on Christmas Day 1931. Having spent the day with family and friends at his home in Paris, Picasso completed a small painting – a surrealistic take on Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793), with a woman killing her rival.

Woman with a Dagger

It’s difficult to see Woman with Dagger as one of Picasso’s great works, but like so much that follows it, it offers a fascinating insight into the state of his mind.

Such is the nature of the artist’s work rate that this exhibition cannot hope to include every work from that period, but there is still so much – and of such variety – as to make you wonder at the sheer ferocity of productivity.

It was a year that saw Picasso produce a series of works based on Matthias Grünewald’s Crucifixion from his Isenheim altarpiece (1510-15), at the same time as he was creating a series of Dionysian paintings of beach scenes. An intriguing juxtaposition of themes.

Nude in a Black Armchair

There are prints here, works using charcoal and works using ink; a piece made with objects stuck into the paint on a canvas – a leaf, a butterfly – together with sculpture and paintings.

The curators have also used one room to partially recreate that first Picasso retrospective, including a 1901 Blue Period self portrait, Portrait of Olga in an Armchair (1918) and Les Trois Danseuses (1925).

But at the heart of the exhibition – as so clearly at the heart of that year in Picasso’s life – is Marie-Thérèse. Initially painted anonymously, his muse becomes less hidden as the days lengthened and warmed.

The Dream may have an oft-remarked phallic side of her head, suggesting she had sex on the brain, but it is a far more tender work than that might suggest. And a series of large canvases painted that spring effectively re-invented the nude.

Marie-Thérèse is seen with pale, lilac skin and blonde hair, arranged in ways that are sensuous and voluptuous, erotic and tender, with a wonderful simplicity of line: Nude in a Black Armchair is a perfect example.

Reclining Nude

Some of these are also interesting for illustrating the influence of Matisse in the use of decoration in the backgrounds.

It’s just one of the one of the points made in Jack Flam’s excellent Matisse and Picasso: The story of their rivalry and friendship, which is very much worth hunting down.

After the success of the June retrospective, Picasso left for the Normandy coast and continued painting his nudes, with some of them appearing to have flippers rather than limbs, as though they were morphing into sea creatures – possibly a reference to the prowess of Marie-Thérèse as a swimmer.

The Rescue

But that prowess nearly produced a tragedy late in the year, when Marie-Thérèse contracted a serious viral infection after swimming in the Marne. 

And so the artist embarked on a new series of works, picturing bathers drowning and bather being rescued. Marie-Thérèse is identifiable in both of these roles.

This was not art for patrons or dealers, but art for the artist. Art as autobiography; as Picasso himself said in the early summer of that year, as a diary.

Sometimes it can feel particularly difficult to get to grips with Picasso, so vast and wide a range of work did he produce over such a long life, that while this is clearly Tate Modern’s 2018 blockbuster, it offers a welcome opportunity to focus tighter and understand more clearly.

1932 is known as Picasso’s ‘year of wonders’. And Picasso 1932 is enough to leave a deep and lasting impression on visitors and will certainly merit a return visit.

• Picasso 1932 is on at Tate Modern until 9 September. 

An insight into Matisse's inspirations

Spot the milk jug from Collioure

Honestly: who could paint a red beach, with pink-infused sea, and be taken seriously?

Such was pretty much my reaction as a teenage A’ level art student when confronted with Matisse, the art-changing ‘wild beast’.

I was such a dreadfully conservative and conventional creature, even as a teen, that I simply could not ‘get’ any modern art. Apart, that was, from Picasso – but that was only really in terms of a sense that any artist who was as good as he was conventionally at 16 needed to evolve or die creatively.

The Other Half and I found our way to Collioure entirely by accident – or rather, it was because of rugby league and not because of art. The art followed.

And as we returned, year on year, utterly beguiled by the place, I had an epiphany: I ‘got’ Matisse.

It was the same experience – a northern European seeing and experiencing the light of the south.

Give or take another couple of years, and I returned from Collioure with fingers simply itching to take up art again myself.

After almost three decades, I started trying to create art once again.

Flowers and vase

There’s not a huge amount of Matisse’s art in British galleries. The Courtauld in London has a couple – including Red Beach from the year of Fauvism, 1905. In real life, the beach is Port d’Avall in Collioure, and we’ve spent a fair few very happy hours on it.

The Tate Modern’s cut outs exhibition in 2014 was a thrice-visited treat.

Last year’s Gardens from Monet to the Matisse at the RA was, in terms of Matissian content (given his presence in the title) disappointing.

October 2016’s exhibition of Matisse drawings at Eames Fine Art Gallery was a gem.

So when a new exhibition promises lots of Matisee – and an insight into just how his artistic mind worked, then it is an opportunity to be leapt at.

Mattise in the Studio opened at the Royal Academy in London earlier this month.

It’s a compact exhibition by the standard of some of the city’s recent wearying blockbusters – and this is no bad thing.

Grand Mask

The central idea is simple. Matisse collected all sorts of items during his life, which he used in his works, from strips of fabric to African masks to Chinese calligraphy to pots and vases.

Here we see some of these items displayed alongside works that they helped inspire or which directly feature them.

Thus the first room begins with Vase of Flowers from 1924

Next to it is the sea green Andalusian glass vase that is central to the composition. And after that, Safrano Roses at the Window from a year later.

Not only do we get to link the object and the paintings, but these two works offer Matisse in a much more pastel mood than is often the case: in the former, the delicacy of a lace curtain is simply delightful, but for all its simplicity, the use of lines and textures in the composition is sophisticated.

In the next room we have the wonderful Yellow Odalisque from 1937 – and alongside it, the small, decorated table from North Africa and the large pewter jug that feature in the work.

Yellow Odalisque

In the work – another illustration of how Matisse could combine colours on a canvas that, you feel, really shouldn’t work together (and there are a number of artists in Collioure these days who try for the same sort of effect but cannot pull it off) – there seems to be a meeting of worlds.

The jug came from the same area of the country that the artist himself hailed from and its very greyness could be taken as symbolising the grey north meeting the vivid south.

It’s easy to forget, in Matisse’s ecstatic use of colour, that he also had a superb sense of line.

And in the third room, we have a series of brush and ink pieces from the 1950s that that illustrate this perfectly – and the influence of the African masks that Matisse had encountered and collected.

The simplicity of line is simply wonderful – it has such purity and elegance.

These are not simply copies of the masks: have served as an inspiration; a jumping-off point for the artist rather than a straightforward appropriation.

Take The Italian Woman from 1916 as an example. At once extremely conventionally and formally posed, yet she appears to be dissolving into a drab background. It could almost be that the conventionality, with her mask-like face, render her less substantial as an individual.

The Italian Woman

Later, we encounter fabrics and more objects from North Africa – and it was fascinating to come at last into the final room, with some of the cut outs.

These included exhibits that had been seen at Tate Modern back in 2014 – not least the designs for the priests chasuble for the Chapel at Vence. Here, against the background of the decorative influences, you see them in a new light and with a new understanding.

It is a room that also includes a panel of Chinese calligraphy, hung as it was in Matisse’s own home in Nice, alongside some of his own work.

If this exhibition doesn’t have quite the uplifting impact of the cut outs, it has a depth that will set visitors thinking, whether they themselves make art or not.

The idea to group objects of inspiration and the works produced together was itself inspired, but even if you don’t really ‘get’ that, then the chance to see some superb works by such a major figure is not to be missed.

And of course, Collioure is here too – it is believed that the milk jug featured on the painting in the poster (and in other works) was from the village.

The objects themselves have plenty of interest – but it is in their role as ‘actors’ in these artworks makes them so much more.

I’ll be back before it closes.

• Matisse in the Studio is at the Royal Academy until 12 November.

Find out more at the Royal Academy.

Picasso portraits give a fascinating overview

Self-portrait with Palette

When you live in a large city it’s arguably the way of things that you will not know about every cultural event taking place, but even allowing for that, it was a surprise to realise, at the start of this week, that I’d been unaware of a major exhibition in London.

The National Portrait Gallery, in conjunction with the Museu Picasso, Barcelona, has been staging Picasso Portraits, which ends tomorrow.

With little time left, The Other Half and I booked tickets for last night and duly made our way there after work. And after all, given the Catalan giant’s observation that “art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life,” what better way could there be to begin a weekend?

It’s a career-spanning collection that takes us from the end of the 19th century to the 1970s.

Works on display include a small number of photographic portraits to a sketch on a paper napkin to fragments on cards to works in oil to sculptures. It’s an excellent way to get an idea of the range of Picasso’s work and styles.

Self-portrait in charcoal and chalk

The earliest works include some of the most fascinating, including two self portraits – one, sporting a wig from 1897 and the other, in charcoal and chalk from 1889-1900.

Both have an intensity about them, but the latter (reproduction does not do justice to the light of it) particularly caught my eye.

It is difficult with Picasso – perhaps more than with most other artists – to separate artist and art. There is a sense of raw animal power about the subject in both these; of a force of nature that gives you an insight into what he created.

Close by is a 1901 portrait of the French art critic and writer Gustave Coquiot that seems to nod toward Fauvism in its use of green in the subject’s skin, and with a dollop of impasto at the shirt’s throat drawing the eye.

From a personal perspective, I ‘get’ the early Cubist works, but I can’t say I ‘like’ them, with their de-humanising analysis and the muddy palette, though the Head of a Woman bust is more interesting than the canvases.

Far more revealing, for me, are works such as Self-portrait with Palette from 1906, where we see a recognisable style emerging, that combines the classical and the primitive – and leaves us with a sense of the emotion.

Later rooms include one with a range of portraits of Olga Picasso – from the naturalistic to the Cubist.

Portrait of Olga Picasso

And here is the perfect chance to highlight a prime bugbear about this exhibition: the curator’s notes next to each work.

In one exhibit, sitting next to a sketch showing a friend of Picasso in a brothel, the words talk of the friend “carousing with a drunken prostitute”. Well, “carousing” is one way to put it.

Similarly, in a later work – a drawing of the artist Raphael having sex while the pope draws curtains aside to watch – there is no mention of the act, but we are informed that Raphael was known to have an ‘amorous’ character.

This terror of mentioning S.E.X. is only one aspect of the issue: throughout, we’re told what Picasso was thinking as he worked.

Now, it is a fair bet that, when an artist is, say, in a strained relationship, that might show up in their work, but asserting such connections as fact is irritating at best.

However, that is what happened in the room dedicated to Olga – Woman in a Hat (Olga) from 1935 is pretty much definitively described as making a sarcastic comment on his wife’s love of hats, yet also as showing her in such a way as to pity her even as their relationship broke apart.

Woman in a Hat (Olga)

Portrait of Olga Picasso from 1923 has a generally classical approach, yet the eyes have something of the mask-like look of Self-portrait with Palette – but even here the curator is straining to tell us that the formality suggests the relationship was already in trouble.

It’s hardly rocket science to suppose that a self-portrait from 1972 – effectively a skull with a piece missing – was influenced by a sense of his own mortality (he died the following year) but do we really need this stating as though we are incapable of making the links on our own? Indeed, I’m going to suggest that such notes detract from the power of just such a work.

I never use audio guides in galleries, in the UK or abroad, precisely because I think that they get in the way of you really seeing the works.

It’s entirely possible that I might miss something that the in a painting or sculpture that had not been upmost in the artist had in mind at the time of its creation, but then that personal experience of art is part of the ongoing process of creativity; part of what makes art more than imply objects.

Self-portrait, 1972

Yet on occasion, the notes skate over what many people might not know, which could be said briefly and might add something.

In another room, for instance, two notes mention Matisse, yet with no mention of the sense of rivalry between them – most of it on Picasso’s part (see Hilary Spurling’s excellent biography of the French artist), thus not giving any real sense of the claim that the colours of one painting are a deliberate echoing of Matisse.

The other problem here is the lack of any works from the Blue Period. It feels like an obvious gap in what otherwise is a successful use of one type of art to give that career perspective.

All this said, there is plenty to delight – not least some of the more informal works Picasso executed for friends, including a 1957 sketch of the French composer and pianist, Francis Poulenc, which shows how he could get away with caricaturing his friends.

Unlike some exhibitions, this is also not so long as to exhaust. You still have time – just about – to catch Picasso Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London. It finishes tomorrow – and then we have until 2018 for Tate Modern’s just-announced Picasso blockbuster.

National Portrait Gallery