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We’ve all heard of Michelangelo – the long-lived artist who agonised over the ceiling of Rome’s Sistine Chapel. But few of us knew that he formed a surprising 25 year partnership with Sebastiano del Piombo, ten years his junior and collaborated on some of his best work.

A fantastic show which has just opened at the National Gallery sheds light on this creative partnership showing, in delicious detail, how differently each painter approached his art and how successfully their divergent skills fused to create some sensational art.

I was lucky enough to go to the press preview and hear curator Matthias Wivel talk with huge passion about this show.   Michelangelo was primarily a sculptor and an extraordinary draftsman. He loved design and composition and his work was meticulously planned.  Sebastiano, on the other hand, was less concerned with planning and preferred to paint in an organic way, feeling his way into a picture and taking a more random approach.  You could argue that he anticipated the later freedoms which defined the work of impressionist painters.

Sebastiano understood oil paint – a medium which Michelangelo could not abide. He preferred the established method of painting directly onto wet plaster or using pigments mixed with egg temperer on wood panels. Alas, it seems this ideological difference in how to use materials was the cause of a serious falling out and the partnership ended.

It’s fascinating to look at Michelangelo’s unfinished paintings; he would complete entire figures and leave others undone.   Sebastiano would tend to use paint across the piece and build up colour and texture.  I was very struck by two portraits he made of Pope Clement VII.  The first was of a powerful and successful pontiff. The second, painted a few years later, shows him bearded, shorn, defeated and disappointed.  His political dealings with the French emperor had not gone well and Rome was sacked on his watch.

But what a legacy of their shared work remains.  It was a joy to view these paintings, to see so many sketches and sculptures tool, which celebrate two masters of their day.

 

 

 

 

I think that collage puzzles many people.  Random, surreal, fragmented, simplistic… Perhaps, as children, we’ve all cut out interesting images from magazines, books or comics and arranged them on a surface in a way that pleases the eye.  In simple terms, this is exactly what many of the giants of 20th century art did and created some compelling and memorable works.

This show at Luxembourg & Dayan, a small gallery in Savile Row, central London, has gathered together a fascinating collection – indeed, a collage – of unusual artworks.  I guess the joy of the collage is the element of surprise, that moment when you fuse one image or idea with another and create something entirely new.  If you look at the Joan Miro (above), it’s called Metamorphose and was made in 1936.  It’s a glorious mix of pencil, dribbled Indian ink, a few brushes of watercolour, bits of decorative sticker and a photo from a magazine of sunbathers.  So how on earth does a piece like that get made?  Miro must have had a studio filled with bits and pieces, obviously a ready supply of art materials and, most of all, a curious mind.  There’s no reason WHY these random objects and images should fit together but it is the cleverness of the artist’s mind which creates a balance which is playful and somehow balanced.  Not everyone could do this.

Think about that famous collage by Matisse – The Snail.  It’s a fabulously random piece using pieces of painted paper arranged by the artist to great effect.  People have separated those pieces and tried to rearrange them upon the canvas differently and nobody has came close to the the satisfying design Matisse made. He saw something no one else could.  

So, collage works can sometimes look beguilingly simplistic but, rest assured, the artist will have tried a great many ideas before alighting on the one which is finally fixed in place.  There’s also a much more scary and bold element to this form of art and that’s the stage when you draw or paint directly onto the piece, even though it might look quite finished.  It feels dangerous with a high risk that the piece could be trashed. When it works, the artist can feel satisfied that they have managed a strange almost psychic PUSH into another visual dimension.

I’m on a mission to see and celebrate all the collages shows I can, particularly where paper is used.  My own use of collage is more literal – I use fragments of paper like brush strokes rather than as strong compositional pieces – but maybe it’s time to give myself a bit of a PUSH! We’ll see.

 

This afternoon’s Papershades workshop was huge fun with two very talented and creative ‘students’.  There’s just no knowing what you will end up making when you come to this workshop.  Jane was thrilled with her very pretty collaged lampshade featuring girls in pretty fifties dresses.  “I never imagined I would do something like this,” she said.  Although she’d come with existing artwork and an idea of what she might do, being introduced to a wide range of possibility was seductive and sent her in an entirely new direction. And the making of this delightful retro creation was the result.

Fia loves bumblebees. She’d come with a photograph of one and used it as a guide for the design. It was so exciting to see Fia using paper from a bathroom tile catalogue to create her artwork and combining it with a mix of tissue paper and other printed paper.  The bumblebee looks enchanting and the flower it is about to alight upon – or maybe has just visited – looks wonderfully weighty yet graceful.

Really impressed by these wonderful shades which will now adorn their homes.

http://www.papershades.co.uk

If I were to describe a picture and told you it featured two grumpy faces, the pin-sharp tines of a pitchfork, the steeply pitched roof of a clapboard church with a pointy window you’d probably guess that it was American Gothic by Grant Wood (The Art Institute of Chicago); it’s possibly the most iconic image to represent America in the 1930s and I was lucky enough to see this amazing painting for real at the Royal Academy of Arts‘ new show, America After the Fall.

The drawn faces of the farmer and his wife (or possibly his daughter) conjure the tough days of dust-bowl America in the 1930s, a time of economic disaster and meltdown, especially for the small farmers who were forced to leave their homesteads in the mid-west.

This show provides a snapshot of the turbulent ‘thirties which endured two recessions and, through art, charts a disillusionment with the ‘American dream’ and the end of an ‘age of innocence’. There are some really great pictures – many of which have not been seen in the UK before.  I’m familiar with works by artists such as Hopper, Guston and Pollock but it’s a joy to be introduced to other painters of that time; for example, I loved the  vivacity and colour of a domestic scene entitled Thanksgiving by Doris Lee full of delicious detail of the frenzy of kitchen activity in preparation of the feast.

I was very struck by Daughters of the Revolution by Grant Wood – three pretty grim looking ladies upholding the traditions of the Pilgrim fathers.  Interesting and rather distasteful that these immigrant descendants feel entitled to claim a kind of supremacy over all subsequent immigrants to America.

Capturing the vitality of growing cities and rapid urbanisation I loved the painting by Stuart Davis entitled New York -Paris which was wonderfully stylised and also In Fourteenth Street by Reginald Marsh which oozes the energy and frenzy of New York.

It’s a thoughtfully and well presented show which captures a fascinating and transitional moment in American history.

Whilst touring Revolution, the fabulous exhibition of post-revolutionary Russian art, at the Royal Academy of Art, my eye was caught by an exhibit in a glass case.  It was an example of  papier-mâché and lacquer art – a technique known as Palekh, after the village where it originated.  Palekh papier-mâché trays and boxes are beautifully and delicately painted with rural scenes and images based on Russian fairy tales and folk stories.

As a paper geek I was obviously drawn to this little box and the intriguing image on the box which apparently shows life on a collective farm.

Then I realised that I’d seen something very similar before. I’d grown up with one of these boxes in the family home. It moved around with us and always contained lost buttons, drawing pins and bits of broken toys.  It had been bought from Palekh by my father when he was in Moscow in the 1950s.  As I child I used to gaze at the lovely lady with her glorious golden locks and the potentially threatening hunter with the bow and arrow spying on her. The image was painstakingly painted in beautiful colours.

For a long time I didn’t really believe that the box I so admired was actually made of paper – the lacquer finish makes it shiny and strong and provides a smooth surface for the painter.   Well, after the RA show I took a much closer look at the family Palekh box and feel very proud and pleased that we own such an amazing example of this enchanting art form.

 

 

So exciting to have been featured in the March issue – thank you Computer Arts!

With an eye to the centenary of the Russian Revolution, a new show of art has opened at the Royal Academy of Arts. It covers just a few years, 1917 – 1932, but what a turbulent time it was as the new order asserted itself.

The image above is rather a playful impression of Stalin by Georgy Rublev which would not have found favour if it had been seen and, rather tellingly, it never left the artist’s studio in his lifetime. The exhibition shows how the rather muted, post-impressionist style of painting was replaced by vast canvases of bold colour as the revolution got under way, followed by images celebrating industry, the vitality of making, the glory of the ‘heroic’ body and the importance of women.  But all of this is followed by a subtle sense of loss, of memories of the old order and an acknowledgement of the art world to conform to a rigid regime.

It must have been a tough time to have been an artist.  Obedience was a necessary part of the ideology of the new Communist regime and artists have never wanted to adhere to rules.  There are some wonderful portraits of the creatives of the day for whom things did not end well. For example, I loved the portrait by Alexander Golovin of Vsevolod Meyerhold, an experimental theatre director who was arrested, tortured and executed in 1940.

Abstract art was regarded with great suspicion but Supremacism found favour and there are examples of huge geometric works by Malevich to illustrate this bold movement.

While the communist ideals were eagerly adopted in cities and within manufacturing it was a different story in the countryside.  Boris Grigoriev captures the doubt in the face of the Old Dairy Woman and a group of farm workers who look a bit grim.

 

And yes, there are collages!  I rather like the idea that this most subversive of art forms could be used to record of all that was happening but always with that edgy potential for irony. Here’s a detail from Red Army: First Cavalry by Solomon Telingater (1928) Sorry that it’s rather out of focus – blame the camera on my phone.

The show is on until 17th April 2017.