Material Gestures

Material Gestures – Tate Modern

 

Despite me often referring to Tate Modern as Modern Tat on account of it’s predilection to consider ‘Modern’ a pre-requisite for exhibition in itself, I am not an artistic luddite.

 

The reason why I mention this is because whenever galleries ‘bring out the dead’ they do so usually in two different ways. One to form an educational or sequential timeline in which to try and make sense of a purely stylistic development or two, in an attempt to marginalise 20^th century works as amateur or not for mass public consumption. Or in the case of more ‘seated’ collections - anything non figurative.

 

More can be made of this through the writings around ‘dehumanisation’ of art by Ortega Y Gasset 1949.

 

Material Gestures is, for me, an uneasy fit from the first curatorship approach. It is of course great to see old favourites given an airing, but this ‘exhibition’ is an odd fit for either chronology or stylistic osmosis.

 

The presence of Monet seems a strange populist choice if only there to say ‘Monet did it first’ as an example of abstraction. It would not in itself take account of style borne out of physical ailment and therefore set it up as purposeful which, despite what we now call impressionist having broken the rules in it’s use of En plein air, would really not claim to have invented abstraction or expressionism.

 

Despite the weird curatorship, three pieces really caught my eye and I felt privileged to once more stand face to face with a Pollock, Hepworth and an artist I had only ever seen in reproductions Mark Tobey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jackson Pollock

Summertime: Number 9A (1948)

Oil, enamel and house paint on canvas

 

By 1948 Pollock had been living in Long Island for 3 years having escaped the New York city sky line.

His move was helped by Guggenheim having lent him the money to move to his new studio a 'converted' barn with no heating or lighting, a small homestead in The Springs, a rural hamlet near East Hampton, Long Island.

In Summertime Number 9a we see a man liberated (and sober). His process which was to become his trade mark dripped and poured paint was now formed and this painting seems a celebration of the summer senses he must have been immersed in both physically and mentally.

The pattern is beautifully balanced across the surface, it’s layers suspended over one another. Summertime reflect his belief that ‘The modern artist ... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces’. From 1947/48 his dripped layered canvases provided abstract expressionist compositions that earned both praise and scorn from the critics. Some dismissed them as meaningless and chaotic, while others saw them as superbly organized, visually fascinating and psychologically compelling. Clement Greenberg, one of Pollock's most ardent supporters, argued that he was "the most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one".

With several one-person exhibitions to his credit and work included in important group shows, Pollock was receiving significant attention. A profile in the 8 August 1949 issue of Life magazine introduced his challenging art to a nationwide audience and cemented his growing reputation as the foremost modern painter of his generation.

For me this painting is a celebration of nature and personal freedom. Pollock seems able to provide the viewer with a cinemascope landscape worthy of a John Ford westerns and here Pollock also creates, by way of the elongated canvas, a view into his natural vista.

This period offers an all too short burst of creative freedom in bloom which by 1955 had stopped painting all together as he reverted to drink which finally killed him in a car crash, driving while drunk.

 

Mark Tobey

Northwest Drift (1958)

Tempera and gouache on paper laminated on board support

This one is, on the face of it pattern like to the point of banal. Once you stop and look the use of a limited tonal pallet is though, a craft in itself. I use the term craft because to me this is applied art as fine art. His ability to balance the tone across the canvas is superb. The more you look into this one the more you see.

 

It is of course derived and representational of natural forms but his background in studying Chinese calligraphy shines through this gouache piece, bringing weight, balance and control.

 

 

 

A departure from Pollocks often random visual appeal, Tobey is an altogether more considered and meditative painter in application.

 

He called this approach 'white writing' a term reflecting his background and approach. He described the piece and the landscape which inspired him.

 

 ‘Seattle where I painted this picture is a place of virginal winds, air currents and intermingled seasons... Gray skies, grey water make one conscious of this colour and I have used a series of grey tones which seem so indigenous to the locale.’

 

My Third piece is a sculpture from British Sculptor Barbara Hepworth

 

 

 Dame Barbara Hepworth

Orpheus (Maquette 2) (Version II) 1956, (edition 1959)

Brass and cotton string sculpture

This is a smaller version of a previous larger work Theme on Electronics (Orpheus) made for an electronics firm (Oh yes in those days corporations saw contemporary art as a status symbol). The theme being a harmony between modern technology and music composition.

 

Although this piece differs from the other two pieces not only as a sculpture but in that Hepworth's work did not derive 'from' nature but instead was born out of abstract forms, her approach to the art of sculpting was described by her as a 'biological necessity' and more abstractly through her interest in telluric forces which shape the landscape.

 

 

For Hepworth a reaction against representational art was developed as early as the 1934

 

"I do not want to make a stone horse that is trying to and cannot smell the air. How lovely is the horse’s sensitive nose, the dog’s moving ears and deep eyes; but to me these are not stone forms and the love of them and the emotion can only be expressed in more abstract terms. I do not want to make a machine which cannot fulfil its essential purpose; but to make exactly the right relation of masses, a living thing in stone, to express my awareness and thought of these things ... In the contemplation of Nature we are perpetually renewed, our sense of mystery and our imagination is kept alive, and rightly understood, it gives us the power to project into a plastic medium some universal or abstract vision of beauty."

 

This piece is a beautiful example of Hepworth and contemporaries like Henry Moore having explored the idea of ‘hole’ in sculptural works – a little like the negative space employed in painting. The breaking down of solid forms to allow movement through and around and bringing the outside – in while also suggesting form with the use of threads and wire. These forms and concepts had also been explored around this time in architecture which would be epitomised through architects like Mies van der Rohe.

 

By the 1950’s she was celebrated and internationally renowned leading to these private and public commissions working largely in bronze but always retaining an approach which referenced her early work through carving and an innate sensibility and faithfulness to materials – beautiful!

 

Material Gestures – Tate Modern, London UK