Andrea Marechal Watson rounds up some of the summer’s art highlights
I have long wanted to try out Tate to Tate, the riverboat that takes you from Tate Modern to Tate Britain and slices 40 minutes off the journey by underground. Three new exhibitions provided the impetus. Starting at Tate Modern, I was intrigued by fame of Emily Kam Kngwarray (c.1914-1996), who emerged as an artist in her late sixties and became internationally renowned within a decade.
The show opens with a map of the Northern Territory of Australia where she was born in the Anmatyerr tribe. Place names like Mosquito Bore, Black Fellow Bone Bore and Utopia Station give a flavour – enhanced by recorded chanting – of the Aboriginal country which is fundamental to this art. Beginning with batik, Kngwarray transitioned to large acrylic paintings covered in constellations of dots in the 1980s, a period which saw the rise of distinctive style, now a hallmark of Western
Desert Aboriginal art. The term Dreaming is often used to describe the subject matter of this art with its complex cultural concepts but it’s misleading. Aboriginal art has more to do with knowledge of the earth, natural forces and ancestral spirits than dreams and fantasy.
Artists may express themselves through song, dance and storytelling as well as painting, there being no traditional written Aboriginal culture. Kngwarray explored all these forms but it’s really the dot paintings that dominate this show – until the last rooms where we find Kngwarray exploring line, and at the very end employing bold brushwork and vibrant colours in wonderfully expressionistic works almost as if she had suddenly discovered Kandinsky.
The next stop would take me – via the boat – into the altogether different dimension of the lesser known British painters Edward Burra (1905-1976) and Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) both at Tate Britain (far from the tranquil cruise I was expecting the journey was bouncy and noisy but had a great view of the Houses of Parliament.) Burra, crippled by ill health throughout his life, grew up parodying the Bohemian characters and cafe life during Europe’s Roaring Twenties. His art was the drug he used to control his chronic arthritis and anemia – but his suffering remains visible in often vicious caricatures of people like the Dolly Sisters and gay sailors who frequented the bars of Marseilles and Toulon.
When Europe was plunged into war, beginning with the Spanish Civil War and later the Second World War, life took a very different turn. Satire becomes despair in disturbing canvases commenting on the horrors of war. A number of macabre paintings such as Hostesses 1932 were included in Surrealism exhibitions – although Burra was not a member of the group. Passing rather rapidly through these depressing rooms, one reaches the section focussing on Burra’s post-war life in Britain.
With his health declining further, his travels were limited to driving tours of Britain and Ireland. Now there was a new threat to deal with – the horrors of industrialisation. Mine shafts litter mountains and petrol stations occupy the countryside in Cornish Clay Mines 1970, in contrast to the carefree world Burra had once known and painted.
I expected to find more joy in the show devoted to Ithell Colquhoun (which is included in the ticket price) who left her collection to the Tate. A member of the Surrealist group before being ejected on the grounds of her obsession with the occult and mysticism, she was also a committed feminist which did not sit too well with a movement rooted in chauvinism. Many of her works delve into the notion of the divine female, and she drew inspiration from Celtic tradition and Cornwall where she lived and worked.
Although she had attended the Slade Art School where her teachers included Henry Tonks, her interest in the occult increasingly influenced her art, much of which seems to have been inspired by communication with psychic forces: not something that the deeply traditionalist Tonks would have approved of.
Her name fell entirely into obscurity but thanks to the sudden surge of interest in female surrealists she now has a show at the Tate and – flawed and minor as it is – her surreal masterpiece of 1938, Scylla, is alone worth the visit.
Georges de la Tour: From Shadow to Light
The work of Caravaggio has so often overshadowed that of his followers that it’s good to see the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris devoting an exhibition to Georges de La Tour (1593-1652): one of the greatest French painters of the 17th century whose luminous works are often confused with those of Caravaggio. The exhibition promises to offer a new perspective on the painter’s career, and to answer some of the questions surrounding the path he took.
Few original works survive. This has not helped art historians in their research, but despite this Georges de La Tour remains an influential figure. His subtle and spiritual works influenced the iconography of subsequent French artists for generations. The museum has bought together some 30 paintings and graphic works including genre scenes and portraits of saints and including his famed use of artificial lighting to create effects.
Rather than imitating Caravaggio, La Tour interpreted the use chiaroscuro in a highly personal way, infused by both the radical realism and intense spirituality that give his works a particular modernity.
