Francis Bacon: Human Presence: National Portrait Gallery

Some people seem born to paint.

In the 20th century, painting was such a powerful crucible for psychological processing. What parts of the psyche can be expressed through imagery while the whole world is at war.

Bacon's trajectory in painting was to go deeper into his own language. He didn't really deviate and experiment with different styles once he had found his voice. He just developed and went further.

I remember seeing the screaming Pope paintings many years ago, and the impact they had. The imagery has been deeply influential in culture - think horror movies and album covers. They are still terrible and unsettling, but I've never quite seem then in the way described in the exhibition text. Rather than scaling back and revealing the trappings of powerful men, I feel full of pity for the figures, and how we are all caught in our own fragmentary, illusionary identity. Truly successful paintings manage to maintain ambiguous balance, always open to reinterpretation.

Frances Bacon, Head VI, 1949

Bacon was deeply knowledgeable about and influenced by art history. In the exhibition this relationship is clear, especially his obsessions with the Velasquez's Pope and Van Gogh.

I was reminded very much of the paintings of Walter Sickert, and the revealing of the inner person, the shadow self, distorted by the maelstrom of feelings and urges.

                    Frances Bacon, Self Portrait 1973                            Walter Sickert, Self Portrait, 1896

                                                       Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Fruit Basket, 16th century

There is also a feeling in Bacon's portraits of the Cortical Homunculus, a sensory representation of what it feels like, rather than looks like to be human. We don't normally see the distortions Bacon paints, but we feel them. He almost sees and paints ectoplasm.

             Frances Bacon, Head of a Boy, 1960

The exhibition includes Francis Bacon on film and in photography. He stated that he hated his own face, but it is so expressive and revealing. Perhaps that is why.

J.S Lewinski, Francis Bacon, 1967

Once again the NPG have delivered a generous and meticulous exhibition. It's the nearest you'll get to walking through another person's psyche.

The portraits don't need the parallels I have shown, but that's how I saw it all, what I brought. These paintings will never lose their power, nor their place in art history.

                                

Francis Bacon, Portrait of a Man                   Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No2, 1912

Walking down Steps, 1972  

National Portrait Gallery, London

10 October 2024 to 19 January 2025

National Portrait Gallery Francis Bacon

Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII's Queens: National Portrait Gallery

I had high hopes for this exhibition, after all, we just can't get enough of the Tudors, can we? It's an intriguing thought, all those characters that still keep showing up in our culture, congregated together once again after a few centuries. So much of our system of government, law and religion still reverberate from the time of Henry VIII and the fate of his six wives. Books, TV programmes and films barely take a break from reimagining and reinterpreting different aspects of the main players, heroes, villains and victims.

As a reviewer, I feel my role is to reflect the scope and scale of an exhibition, the experience of being there, and whether if fulfils it's own brief. Personally, I always like to go to an exhibition knowing as little about it as possible, except that I have a reason or expectation about it. A review is not the exhibition essay or report, and so I will just give a few glimpses for any visitor to enjoy making their own discoveries without spoilers. And, especially in this case, to raise expectations.

I'd like to mention the absolutely exquisite production values on show. The walls are deep jewel colours, the lighting uses shadow and glowing drama, the wall script is informative but concise, and the mounting is perfection.

Perhaps we think we know the stories of the six women, still debated long after they either were divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded or survived. This exhibition collects a wealth of treasures demonstrating that the myths, herstories and legends they inspired have been swirling around since their own time, and that in their after life, as in life, they were portrayed as political pawns, cautionary tales or archetypes.

I truly love an exhibition with paintings and artefacts together. We are so near to the items these people  knew and touched. There is the painter, the subject, and then yourself, the viewer, with only a glass frame in between. Not even time can separate that immediacy, even if the time is a few centuries. There is such a sense of presence in this exhibition. Many of the images are quite familiar, but this is the first time such a major exhibition about the six wives of Henry VIII has been produced, and the first time these paintings and artefacts have been drawn together. Mammoth bibles, personal books, jewellery, costume, letters, a 1920's film, photography and more, allow the portraits to come to life even more and to really live in the imagination.

I got chatting to a couple of lovely mud larking ladies (hello!) who have found similar items to some  depicted, such as Tudor buttons, on the banks of the Thames. With the river just a few streets away from the NPG, I looked over at another marvellous Holbein painting and was suddenly struck with the thought that all these mighty characters who knew each other in life, who fought to survive, and politicked and manoeuvred, had been gathered in spirit once again in London. What happens at night when the lights go out?

This is a paid exhibition, with a programme of events. There are also some times when you can pay what you want - look online.

National Portrait Gallery, London

20 June to 8 September 2024 

national portrait gallery six lives

Judy Chicago: Revelations: Serpentine Gallery

Judy Chicago is an icon of feminist, contemporary and recent art. Her works, especially The Dinner Party of 1974-1979 places her practice firmly in the herstory of art and the rewriting of culture to include the women who had been there all along.

The Serpentine are calling Revelations an exhibition and not an actual retrospective, but it is a retrospective really, with works covering all six decades of her career, and her largest solo London show. However, it's astounding that there is not more about The Dinner Party, the work which launched Chicago's international reputation and place in the development and elevation of feminist art. I was lucky to attend the press view, and had a couple of chats with others there. We all discussed The Dinner Party, and I'm not sure it's really possible to appreciate Chicago without it.

Judy Chicago Revelations

It seems against all my reviewing principles to write about a work that's not in the actual exhibition, but in brief, The Dinner Party made a splash in the art world in the late 70's and 80's. I saw it myself many years ago when it was on show in London, and it made an enormous impression on me. I remember it made quite a splash in the media at the time, in the sense of the 'is this really art' debate. If you want to know more...www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/dinner_party/ (Perhaps there are copyright issues involved in recreating even one setting of this culturally significant piece.)

That work, and Chicago's whole output, had influence outside the world of art, bringing into public consciousness forgotten women that she celebrated. It's not just about art, it's about culture and society. Now in her eighties, Chicago still speaks with fire and emotion about rebalancing the world away from toxic patriarchy. This is always highly politicised issue-based artwork, but never at the expense of beauty and technique. Women's' pain and the deep wounds of inequality are the subjects, from the woman's point of view.

Chicago has a particular aesthetic in drawings and prints. I do admire an artist who is fundamentally still regularly in the studio, just them and the paper.

Judy Chicago Revelations

I didn't know anything about her pyrotechnic and smoke works, represented in videos and stills. They are gorgeous and astounding, and for me, the best kind of works which can be viewed and interpreted in multiple ways. Chicago was a trailblazer, continuing to produce powerful art in the face of discrimination. She was an outsider in terms of artworld acceptance, who carried on regardless, and has forged a trail. It turns out it is great to meet your heroes.

Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago Revelations

Serpentine North, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA

23rd May - 1st September 2024

Admission free

Yinka Shonibare: Suspended States: Serpentine Gallery

Yinka Shonibare is an artist whose work is usually immediately recognisable, with his career-long use of Dutch wax print fabrics and their interplay with colonial imagery. It still shocks, and also delights, to see a Winston Churchill or Queen Victoria statue decorated with the bright yellows and blues, pinks and reds of African costume, the floral and paisley prints taking over the very substance of the person. Usually oversized and imposing, these figures seem cut down to size.

 Decolonised Structures Yinka Shonibare

It's as if from now on, every such statue that you see of a person in power, each symbol of authority and subjugation has such fabric and design projected upon it. Shonibare has done that to the imagination. Such figures, the evidence of wealth, just cannot be seen any more without the awareness of the colonised nations who paid such a heavy price for empire. We can no longer go through our cities and the grandest central buildings, the areas of commerce, without an awareness of the legacy of plantations and slavery which funded them. The history has always been there, and is now uncovered and exposed.

Shonibare is a creator, not a destructor. He subverts through beauty, the most powerful of arts. He adds.

The work is deeply researched and based upon knowledge and the retelling of history. The retruthing of history. And yet he maintains the lightest of touches. What he does is in plain sight, and yet his work can be approached, and is approached, in many ways. It is the colours of the Dutch wax prints, it is the history of that batique fabric in Africa, along with all its glorious aesthetic values.

The dark central room of the Serpentine houses a collection of  dark architecture model-like buildings, glowing from within with the illumination of his signature fabrics. It's a stunningly beautiful piece, and like a dream come true to wander in there. Again, the cathedrals and buildings of the West are shown with African culture long embedded within the walls and windows.

Sanctuary City Yinka Shonibare

Not just a shelf of books, but walls, an entire library, It's such a generous presence, gorgeous to the eye. You know there is more order there, underlying meanings, and after a while, you realise that the books are marked for wars and conflicts, and some unnamed for those yet to be. Like all intriguing libraries that can only be looked at and not touched, the mind fills in with possibilities and imagining what treasures may be hidden within the volumes.

 The War Library and Yinka Shonibare

This entire show is meticulous and a pleasure to be in. I found it deeply moving and inspiring. There is nothing heavy handed about the message, and that is what gives Yinka Shonibare his power.

Serpentine South, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA

12th April - 1st September 2024

Admission free.

www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/yinka-shonibare-cbe-suspended-states/

Portraits to Dream In: National Portrait Gallery

Imagine being one of the very earliest photographers, exploring the meanings and possibilities of a new world. In the mid nineteenth century, and for a considerable time after, photography was very hands on, as much a darkroom science as art. This really was the reality for photography until fairly recent digital technology, that each plate was as much a consideration of time as light and composition. Now we can take twenty quick snaps on our phone, and choose the best, but then, each image was infinitely more considered. Every photograph required so much processing and further investment of effort, that quality far outweighed the idea of quantity.

Imagine being one of the first people to realise the painterly qualities of photography, and how it can capture aspects of character and personality unique to the medium.

We are used to seeing some weird Victorian photographs, the propped up dead family members in a studio setting, the glum, serious, buttoned up portraits. We appreciate that exposure took so long that people had to keep still, much longer than anyone could say cheese. In Cameron's work we know the subjects have been arranged and are sitting for a long time, really settled into the pose. There is a ghostliness about the slight blurring, an awareness of the soul, and what the photograph can only allude to but never capture.

I seem to remember writing my fine art degree dissertation about light hitting the camera, and how that is the same light that the photographer saw, that bounced off the subject. While a painting is the same paint, and a sculpture is the same stone that the artist touched, there is something about the same light, and sharing the same moment in time that is thrilling for me.

It's a rare and privileged treat to see so many of the actual prints in this exhibition. It's been a triumph of organisation and logistics to arrange international loans. Some of these images I knew quite well, and probably had on a postcard on my teenage bedroom wall. I love that feeling of being a bit star struck to meet an artwork in the flesh, to see its marks and substance, rather than just its image. These works are so rarely seen that they are too delicate to photograph directly, or to have flash. The relationship with light continues.

As a completely freelance and in fact unfettered reviewer, I can focus on whatever I like. I never feel it's my role to reflect an entire exhibition, but to give my impression. In some ways this show is curated with a delightfully light hand - the mounting and framing is meticulous, the colour of the walls are somehow unnamable and glowing, the lighting is sympathetic. The script on the walls is absolutely right, quite spare - how often has your eye been drawn away from the work, especially in photography exhibitions, to read the text? Here the work speaks for itself, and is arranged thematically.

However, I found the curation of this exhibition extremely insistent, if not heavy handed. I admit that I just didn't have the bandwidth to look at the Francesca Woodman photographs, and ended up skipping them entirely in favour of the Camerons. This was not a slight on a wonderful artist, but I felt the comparison and juxtaposition, a perfectly valid and reasonable curator's choice, just did not work for me. Perhaps it's like programming music - I can easily listen to a concert of Sibelius and Stravinsky, but I just can't listen to them at the same time.

I came to see the Julia Margaret Cameron photographs. I wanted to dive into that aesthetic. Yes, these two artists have so many qualities and parallels, in their allegorical approach to photography, and in aesthetic, but I would have had a preference for more separation in sections. In an exhibition I want to make my own discoveries, and not constantly be told how to see things. I love a bit of judicious juxtaposition. Portraits to Dream In constantly interrupts itself by shuffling the two artists together.

I was reminded of an exhibition I once went to in Prague, where the attendants were extremely annoyed that I wandered about rather than follow the prescribed sequence.

I almost want to return, this time just to look at the gorgeous Francesca Woodman works, the poignant flowering of a short life.

The National Portrait Gallery has had another revamp. It really is exquisite and well worth a visit. A Pay as You Wish scheme opens this exhibition up to all.

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In 

National Portrait Gallery,  London 

21March - 16June 2024

www.npg.org.uk2 francesca-woodman-and-julia-margaret-cameron-portraits-to-dream-in

Addition 21 March 2024

I woke up this morning in a new realisation about the curation question. I know enough about dyslexia to recognise its effect, even if that is delayed. A typical initial response is an inner feeling that there is somehow something wrong or missing with the self, because I can't access perfectly accessible information. I mean, what's wrong with me!

Dyslexia is about processing information in the mind. It's individual, but there are shared characteristics. The dyslexic mind is creative because it MUST invent for itself patterns and connections. What can be found in that way can be astonishing, but the dyslexic mind also finds it extremely difficult to follow prescribed patterns of thought. I recognise this. I know it.

It is typical of dyslexia to find it frustratingly distracting to be faced with conflicting and simultaneous information. The eye scatters - a simple example is that dyslexic people find columns of print difficult to read because their eyes are particularly distracted by the overwhelm of information in the other columns. This is the way Portraits to Dream In is presented. Perhaps it is a very smooth experience for neuro-typical and neuro-linear people to access. For dyslexic and neuro-diverse people I truly bet that I will not be alone.

This exhibition would be an ideal setting for a proper psychological study if it could quickly be devised and arranged. I have written about this area before, in the aftermath of my own psychology masters and study, and my experience of assessing exhibitions for Arts Council England. If it could be done, I'd love to do it.

Banksy Tree Finsbury Park

Banksy Watch: 10May24

I hadn't been round to visit the local Banksy for a while, and was curious what might have happened now that Spring has really sprung. Of course, now the tree itself has sprouted more foliage, reflecting the graffiti, and it's that, along with all the layers of fencing and perspex there which is going to continue changing.

Now the whole thing looks muffled and a bit unremarkable by all those layers of context. More plaster is peeling off the wall. It's quite hard to see the Banksy at all. It's certainly a mess.

Banksy Watch: 08Apr24

Graffiti is really an ephemeral art, and it's Banksy's works which are the anomaly, in that they get preserved. Around where I live there are a couple of places where graffiti artist work, especially a tunnel along the Parkland Walk. Apart from all the toxic fumes, it's really amazing to see the work, which of course, it gets painted over, sprayed over, even sometimes scribbled on. I don't know what the inside etiquette of that is, but graffiti comes and goes.

Behind the boards and screens, you can see that the plaster on the wall is already beginning to fall off. I'm sure that happened after the screen was put there, and so it is rapid weathering of a base which was never intended to last. You can also see the tree budding, and even stubby blossom, making this all a very living piece.

Banksy Watch: 27Mar24

What the actual ^%$JK^)$£"£_$%^%$+????!!!!

Not my words. I quote from the person next to me visiting the Banksy Tree. I can only agree with the eloquence of that.

Well, it was born in the wild, and this is its jungle. If Banksy had painted his tree background on the wall outside Tate Modern, I guess it would be a different story. As it is, this is what you get.

Banksy Watch: 25Mar24

I went the long way home, and can't believe I was there just at the right time when the perspex cover was being installed.

I really don't understand why some big art institution like Tate Modern or the National Gallery, or one of the museum, galleries or art installation companies didn't offer a team and experts to Islington Council. Perhaps they did and Islington declined.

Instead we got some guys. Nothing against them, they're doing a days work. But really, what a mess. It's all a bit Laurel and Hardy, if not Chuckle Brothers. It's hilarious and uncomfortable to watch such a Health and Safety void.

People are already coming from all over the world to see this tree. I spoke to a woman from Japan who is in the UK for five days, and now going to use her time visiting other Banksy's. There was an extremely tall European family, and a few others all witnessing this amateurish conservation. Surely this could be done better.

Banksy Watch: 24Mar24

I live near enough to the Banksy Tree to swing by there every so often. It's been a week, and I've been 4 times.

Initially it was a statement of beautification/ meaning/ commentary/ /intervention/ graffiti - insert your own view here. It was an exciting neighbourly event. I find it powerful and eloquent. How soon it has become messy and uglified. I wonder if Banksy himself has been amongst the crowds come to visit. He must know what will happen, but there doesn't seem to be a Banksy back-up team to orchestrate the aftermath. You could almost pity the folk at Islington Council who now have this to deal with.

I've never been to see the Mona Lisa. You may well have, and I hear it's so protected by layers of distorting safety glass and so popular that you sort of shuffle past, unable to really see anything other than its vague presence. The Banksy Tree is becoming layered, you could say encrusted, with layers of safety fencing, warning signs, and now, big wooden struts. I didn't go today, but I imagine that was for some perspex covering which the Council have commissioned as a matter of urgency.

It's a bit disappointing. The Tree will not degrade naturally, nor fade into the urban landscape. It remains vulnerable.

Banksy Tree Update: 2 days later Wednesday 20Mar24

We all know it was only a matter of time before something was going to happen to this. Splattering paint over, or some graffiti was the obvious, and so it is. White paint anyway, so at least not multi-coloured.

This morning I took a bus in London, As any city ride tends to, it went through impressive areas and crappy areas. As I was sitting and thinking, my attention was caught by a little tree in a corner, and the Banksy tree immediately came to mind, and elevated that little tree. All the trees misplaced, misplanted, built around, transformed by a context of imagined paint. Just how many metaphors can you read into that?

It reminded me of something my daughter and a friend of hers used to do - swap photos of mattresses found dumped in the street. It totally transformed something appalling and imposed into not just a game, but a reframing. How often the mattresses were comically slumped, their shoulders shrugged in drunken nonchalance.

It makes the imaginary city better. I think that may well be geopsychology. And the little tree made me realise that I've already let that Banksy into my heart, into the way I see the world and the city. I carefully curate this, as I'm sure we all do.

The other day there was a buzz, and a neighbourly vibe. Already it's different there, with an ugly fence around it. What else can they do?

Monday 18Mar24

Just 10 minutes from my home, in a particularly undistinguished stretch, is a very ordinary street, Hornsey Road. Rumours of a Banksy appearing there brought us for a walk this morning. 

Britain is full of odd little patches of lawn between blocks of council estates and roads. Hornsey Road is main enough to have constant traffic and buses trundling by. On the other side of the road the housing block is slap bang up to the pavement, too near. I've always felt sorry about that, and that I'd find it difficult to live somewhere where traffic and fumes are only a pavement away.

I was particularly struck by the gift of this artwork to such an area as this, truly a little forgotten corner, as if elevating the beauty and potential of all such hidden little corners.

The tree piece is so many things - pollarded branches frame the enormous splatter of green paint on the wall of the Victorian terrace of shops with flats above - just another familiar architectural feature of London after the bombing in World War II. My own home is like that, the abruptly ended terrace where decades ago a bomb fell, the site long filled in with a '50s council block.

So it's an odd little space. And the cropped tree, just undistinguished city furniture, now elevated to it's true significance, and probably international stardom.

The scale, the ambition of the green splatter is wonderful. It's the most perfect site-specific concept. It makes the tree sculptural, and it gives form and meaning to the paint.

Today the patch of pavement was filled with reporters and photographers. There were locals and visitors. What I particularly loved was that it brought out some local arty people, keen to talk, and delighted that for once something like this is on their doorstep. The neighbours of the tree, the people living in these unlikely flats, are being interviewed. The tree belongs to them, and to everyone.

The tree is commentary, it's an intervention, it's bold, beautiful, stunning, unmistakable. It's a happening.