When Roohangiz Saminejad starred in The Lor Girl (1932), the first Persian ‘talkie’, the film had to be shot in Bombay because it was too controversial for an Iranian woman to appear in public without a veil. The film was a huge box office hit but Saminejad suffered terrible harassment; she later changed her name and lived the rest of her life in anonymity.
At the Barbican, she is the first of 28 women depicted by Soheila Sokhanvari in jewel-like miniatures. Each is a labour of love: painted onto calf vellum with a squirrel-hair brush, using the ancient technique of egg tempera. These works are set against epic, hand-painted murals along the 90-metre wall that reference traditional Islamic patterns, designed to dizzy the beholder so that they could contemplate the vastness of the universe and the greatness of God. As you pass Sokhanvari’s mirrored monolith, based on the mysterious form in Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), you enter a world in which painting, sculpture and sound combine to induce an equivalent kind of feminist delirium.
Borrowing from David Bowie’s 1974 cult pop song, Rebel Rebel pays tribute to the extraordinary courage of these female stars – who pursued their careers in a culture enamoured with Western style but not its sexual freedoms – and laments their fate, after the revolution in 1979 left them with a stark choice: renounce any role in public life or be forced into exile. The soundscape, which weaves together the voices of iconic performers including Googoosh and Ramesh, is especially poignant since it remains illegal in Iran for a woman to sing in public. Sokhanvari herself fled to the UK as a child, a year before the Pahlavi regime was overthrown; now a studio artist at Wysing Arts Centre, she works every day on representing poetically the complexities of life in pre-Revolutionary Iran.
In picture gallery: Andy Warhol and Annie Sprinkle
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Alice Neel is in spectacles, striped chair and nothing else. She is 80, cheeks flushed from the effort of being true to herself – “It was so damned hard.” The paintbrush in her hand is directed straight at the naked breast. One eyebrow is raised, rhyming with an energetically upturned toe below. It is a vision of superlative defiance.
Neel’s self-portrait – by now as famous as she is – rightly opens this startling show. The floor has been painted gold, to match the frame, and her shining intelligence. Neel (1900-84) deserves her cult status in American art: a lifelong feminist, humanitarian, activist and braveheart; a woman who painted stubbornly figurative images all the way through abstract expressionism, minimalism and pop, who received scarcely any coverage or wall space.
An artist with such force of personality she could cajole Andy Warhol into sitting half-naked before her, even though he regarded nudity as “a threat to my existence”. Here he sits in a surgical truss, blanket-stitch sutures still bright from the operation that saved him from Valerie Solanas’s attempt to kill him with her gun. His eyes are shut, as if whatever he is cannot be seen or known through appearance alone, skinny pins in brown trousers, feet dangling in old men’s brogues. We are not our bodies.
And it is the weird fact of our own mind-body coexistence that seems at the heart of Neel’s ungainly style. For no matter how familiar the sitters may be – painters, poets, trade unionists and intellectuals, Greenwich Villagers, Warhol’s superstars – the portraits remain outlandish. There is her trademark blue outline, looping, skimming and scudding round each figure, that doesn’t seem bent on correctness of proportion or old-school description. The heads are always slightly too large for the bodies, the brushwork is never flattering but emphatic; here and there you are looking at garrulous caricature.
An early and notorious painting of Joe Gould, dated 1933, shows the wildly eccentric writer surrounded by tiers of male genitals (he has several sets of his own) dangling around like Christmas baubles. Yet even with all this going on, Neel’s brush takes you back every time to the central fact of his gleeful face.
Neel painted right up to her death and was known to phone friends to exclaim: ‘Guess what, I’m still alive!’ Face versus body, the mind in spite of the physique, or perhaps the life itself: that seems a steady fascination. The art critic lies back, voluntarily naked, in the thick pelt of his own body hair: an ape of an odalisque. The pregnant woman, also naked, tries to hold steady on a too-small chair as the new life inside threatens to topple her. The Marxist activist hooks one leg over the chair and raises an arm to expose the dark hair in her pit and yet it all goes awry; the seductive pose, the clothes and the anxious intelligence in her face are at odds.
This show takes a wider and more political view of Neel than most. Here are her paintings of the Uneeda biscuit factory strikes in 1936, police bearing down on workers, innocent children picked out in blood red. Even the horses look oppressed. From the same year, a staggering scene shows protesters marching through Manhattan with “Nazis murder Jews” written on their banners. Neel was among them, her painting historic testimony. Never forget how people knew.
The presentation is also duly biographical. A 1926 portrait of Neel’s first (indeed only) husband, the Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez, who all but kidnapped their child, has overtones of El Greco. Later, her lover John Rothschild is always depicted naked except for his prissy little slippers. In one portrait he is shown peeing in the sink as he examines a strange little wriggling critter in the palm of his hand. He doesn’t seem in on the joke.
But others do. The main gallery is a kind of all-together-now vision of a certain time and place: downtown Manhattan in the 1960s and 70s. The art historian Linda Nochlin tries to keep her daughter composed. The art critic Gregory Battcock comes out in a pair of bright yellow underpants. The poet Frank O’Hara shows his nicotine-stained teeth in a rictus of nervous tension. Only the local taxi driver Abdul Rahman appears tickled with conspiratorial laughter to find himself now her sitter and not the other way round.
And this is surely what they went for: Neel’s company in this studio collaboration. For her personality is as important as theirs to every painting. Sometimes it is evident that they don’t quite know it, of course. Superstar poet and artist Gerard Malanga’s practised pout is a part of his slightly dim performance (and his vanity). One of two Wellesley girls in a double portrait leans directly towards the painter with ardent curiosity, as well she might. Neel, talking in a late documentary at the show’s end, was easily as fascinating and eccentric as any of her sitters. The gusset of the girl’s tights is beginning to show.
This is a terrific selection, superbly curated by Eleanor Nairne and her team with utmost empathy (and the most eloquent captions you will find). It never betrays Neel by sidestepping the graceless, sorry or awkward in her art, just as she never ignored it in life. Her method, Neel said, was to converse with her sitters until they unconsciously assumed their most characteristic pose, thereby revealing “what the world had done to them and their retaliation”.
Fondazione Prada presents Useless Bodies?, an exhibition by the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset. Conceived for four gallery spaces and the courtyard of its Milan venue, the exhibition explores the present condition of the body in the post-industrial age in which it seems that our physical presence is losing its centrality or is even completely superfluous. This shift impacts every aspect of our lives: from our working conditions to our health, our interpersonal relationships, and the way we retain information. The exhibition Useless Bodies? also explores how we physically adapt to a world increasingly based on two-dimensional imagery, not least in the light of the current pandemic.
As stated by Elmgreen & Dragset, “Our bodies are no longer the main agents of our existence. They don’t generate value in our societies’ advanced production methods as they did in the industrial era. One could claim our physical selves have even become more of an obstacle than an advantage. In the 19th century, the body was the producer of daily goods, whereas, in the 20th century, the body’s role became more that of the consumer. Twenty years into the 21st century the status of the body is now that of the product – with our data gathered and sold by Big Tech. With the publicly available knowledge surrounding the harvesting of data from tech companies being so inane, and the rapidly accelerating rate at which such companies are expanding into every aspect of our lives, it does sometimes feel a little scary to think about our bodies’ future role.”
For the visitor, the Hayward Gallery’s extraordinary new exhibition of the late work of the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois is a major undertaking. Thanks both to its size – the show gathers together some 90 collages, sculptures and installations, many of which have never been shown here before – and to the ever-confounding spaces of the gallery itself, inside it takes a little while to get oriented. The eyes must adjust to the Hayward’s permanent dusk; the body must fight a powerful sense of expectation. You want both to rush around in a frenzy and to commune with everything for minutes at a time. In the end, I did two circuits, one fast and one slow, and even then I wasn’t satisfied. Enfolded in the dark pleats of Bourgeois’s mind, the longest glance still seems somehow to be cursory. Here is a series of caverns, each one of which demands to be fully explored.
What’s strange about this spirit of investigation is that Bourgeois’s practice would appear to work against it. Delicate though she may sometimes be, nuance is more or less unknown to her. This is art that’s easy to read, the messages it semaphores close to trite at moments (this may be one reason why the exhibition’s curator, Hayward director Ralph Rugoff, has kept his own interpretations to a minimum). What else could Femme Maison (2001), in which a fabric house has been stitched to a female torso, be about but the burdens of women? What more can be said of Do Not Abandon Me (1999), a piece that comprises the figure of a naked woman and her newborn baby, once you’ve finished speculating to which of them – mother or child – the fear suggested by its title most applies?
The peeping tom effect – a feeling of transgression on your part – only brings you closer to the artist
And yet this lack of ambiguity impedes our curiosity and excitement not one iota. Why? I think it has to do, sometimes, with her media. Even if we’re not allowed to touch it, looking at Bourgeois’s art is a haptic experience: her textures are almost as thrilling as her feeling for narrative drama (for melodrama, sometimes). Mostly, though, it’s connected to a certain lurid intimacy. As Robert Hughes said, her work has a “queer, troglodytic quality, like something pale under a log”. Ugh! you think. And then: but just let me take another look.
The Woven Child focuses exclusively on the last two decades of the artist’s long career, an astonishing burst of late life creativity in fabric and textiles that was born, in part, of memories of her childhood (she died in 2010, aged 98). We know that her growing up was traumatic – she came to regard her father’s affair with her teenage governess as a form of child abuse – but this fiery flurry isn’t only to do with psychological pain. Bourgeois’s parents were tapestry restorers, and in old age she returned to her roots, incorporating needles, bobbins, embroidery and weaving into her art.
If everyday objects are here transformed into miniature horror shows – in Untitled (1996), cow bones are used for coat hangers; in Untitled (2010), pale woollen berets become swollen, severed breasts – what’s displayed is also intensely domestic. Her totemic “progressions”, which revisit her vertical, segmented “personages” of the 1950s, are now made from materials such as bed linen and tapestry work (the latter bring to mind church kneelers). Eugénie Grandet (2009), a series of 16 panels that uses the handkerchiefs and tea towels from the trousseau she brought with her when she moved to the US seven decades before, is (to me, at least) a kind of update of the samplers girls sewed in the 19th century, practising their stitches. (This piece is named, of course, for Balzac’s heroine, a character with whom Bourgeois identified on the grounds that her father, too, was oppressive.)
How to pick out things for special attention in a show in which almost everything is fascinating, horrifying, strange, eerie, beautiful? The first object the eye sees is Cell VII (1998), one of Bourgeois’s enclosures: installations in which personal objects – in this case, a scale model of her childhood home in Choisy-le-Roi, and clothes that belonged both to her and her mother – may be spied as if through a keyhole. The peeping tom effect induced by such storytelling – a feeling of transgression on your part which, paradoxically, only brings you closer to the artist – is not, I should say, unusual.
Moving on, I almost blushed at High Heels (1998), a kneeling figure angled carefully to expose both her buttocks and the soles of her impossible shoes. The curator describes The Reticent Child (2003), in which a series of soft pink figures – they represent the birth and early life of the artist’s youngest son, Alain – appear contorted in the concave mirror behind them, as a “diorama”, and in a literal sense, this is correct. Really, though, it’s so much more private – and dynamic – than the word suggests: a flickering home movie as shot by Dr Freud.
Louise Bourgeois in her studio in Manhattan, 1982. Photograph: Jack Mitchell/Getty Images
Is there a spider? (A favourite motif of Bourgeois, arachnids, those super-weavers, stand for mothers in her world.) Yes, there are several, the biggest of which, Spider (1997), is in the upstairs gallery. This huge steel monster straddles a mesh “cell”, inside which are more of the artist’s belongings, among them a bottle of Bourgeois’s favourite scent, Shalimar. “The spider is a repairer,” she said, and perhaps this sense of restoration – a tapestry-covered chair is also inside the cage – is one reason why this piece induces a creeping sense of contentment as you circle it.
More likely, though, it’s simply the result of its triumphant size. Bourgeois was doing what she did long before feminism finally made her fashionable; it wasn’t until the retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1982 that she began to come out of the shadows as an artist. Nevertheless, it is inspiriting, at this point in the 21st century, to be able to claim her as one of our own; as a warrior who both embraces and disdains the domestic realm, who reads it as both haven and battlefield. The Shalimar, in particular, made me smile. Those heady woody-smoky-vanilla notes floating, in my imagination, in the air around all that metal! Somehow, this encapsulates Bourgeois for me. The female experience is her dominion, and it does not diminish her one bit to say so. But this realm must not merely be seen. It must be sensed, deeply, from within.
“Models provide us with a focus on our world, as its complexity would place an inconceivable load on our apprehension without such filter.” – Thomas Demand
Looking at Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s painting No Such Luxury, I suddenly saw how much she has in common with the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. The work depicts a woman sitting at a table with a cup and saucer in front of her, gazing straight out. That seems simple but the longer you look, the stranger it becomes. Magritte portrayed himself in the same pose in his painting The Magician – except with four arms. Yiadom-Boakye’s canvas may seem, by comparison, a slice of real life. But it’s weirdly out of scale, a bit larger than life. The woman is a monument, her gaze mystical and far-seeing – a Buddha of suburbia.
Yet Yiadom-Boakye has a far deeper affinity with Magritte. She makes us believe in someone who does not exist. Everything about her pictures of people says “portrait”. But these are not portraits. They’re fictional creations, imagined characters. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” Magritte wrote beneath a painting of a pipe. Yiadom-Boakye’s exhibition could have been simply called “This is not a portrait.”
Her paintings would look great on the covers of Penguin Modern Classics – you could have a lot of fun fitting them to your favourite novels. Pale for the Rapture is a diptych – two canvases side by side – of elegantly dressed men in different but equally conventional poses of melancholy, both resting their faces on their hands while they sit cross-legged on sofas, one of which is upholstered in a diamond pattern, the other in yellow and red stripes. A painting called In Lieu of Keen Virtue “portrays” a bearded young man in a salmon sweater with a cat resting on his shoulder.
Maybe these men are not so much characters in novels as novelist characters – they look like they’re taking a break from a morning’s typing in a 1950s Greenwich Village cafe. Many of the people here could be novelists, poets, philosophers, for Yiadom-Boakye’s real theme seems to be sensitivity itself, the nature of the inner life. Some of the most touching pictures are the simplest. To Tell Them Where It’s Got To shows a woman turning away into the shadows, head lowered in sadness, engrossed in secrets.
This painting, like a number of others, has a deliberately nocturnal palette. Dark jumper, brown background, black hair and black skin. Yiadom-Boakye paints black people, and in the most hallowed of traditional European art forms: oil painting on canvas. No acrylics for her, no collage; no photography or abstraction.
She has turned Tate Britain on its head. In a normal year, the Turner prize would currently be revealing the latest video, photography, interactive art and, who knows, maybe a few paintings (Yiadom-Boakye was shortlisted, but didn’t win, in 2012). It’s been cancelled because of the pandemic and here, instead, are room after room of oil paintings. It’s like you’ve taken a wrong turn and ended up in the 18th-century galleries. Except the black people who only play servile, secondary roles in those portraits now occupy the foreground and the high spiritual plane once reserved for white faces in art.Advertisementhttps://fe912d435f7654a61c01f7a8a93d9080.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
Yiadom-Boakye clearly doesn’t loathe the great tradition of oil painting. She can’t do enough of it. Her approach may pass for postmodern but it is saturated in painterly erudition. For there is a long history of portraits that look like painted fictions, and she knows it – distilling that narrative quality while removing references to actual persons. The Ventricular shows a man in a red shirt spreading his arms over a red sofa, vividly recalling the intimate pastels of Degas while also being a Crucifixion. The young man who stands in a strange medium of aquamarine blueness, as if under water, wearing a frilly collar like a clown in A Passion Like No Other gazes outwards with the intense solitude of the rococo artist Watteau’s triste harlequin Gilles, someone caught on the anxious borderline between theatre and life.
Similarly trapped in the flashlight is the young man in For the Sake of Angels, one of the most “real” paintings here – except it’s another fantasy. Wearing an immaculate white shirt and jacket, harshly illuminated by electric spots, he might be a model on a shoot. But he’s unhappy in the role and turns his face away, casting a bleak shadow on the wall as he suffers in the light. This, too, has its old masterly echoes – specifically how Velázquez captures the sadness of the model in the Rokeby Venus, where a nude showing us her back reveals her misery in a mirror.
Light is brutal, public. Shadows hold freedom and introspection. This show is a journey into strange, tenebrous places of the imagination. Again and again Yiadom-Boakye portrays black faces in darkness. It’s her deepest foray into the past of painting: into the realm of chiaroscuro, the melting luxury of shadows that reached its apogee in the Dutch golden age, when Rembrandt and his pupils basked in nighttime settings that intimate the soul.
One of the most sensitive of all Dutch 17th-century paintings, in the Wallace Collection in London, is by Rembrandt’s follower Govaert Flinck . It’s known as The Young Archer and portrays a young African. Flinck focuses on his pensive, private expression and makes him a figure of soulfulness set in chiaroscuro. But he’s no more real than Yiadom-Boakye’s people. Dutch golden age artists often painted fictional personages. They were interested in the expressive potential of the human, beyond any banal concept of “portraiture”. There’s even a name for this genre, the tronie.
So what Yiadom-Boakye is doing is painting tronies. Like Flinck, she reveals that a picture of someone can be so much more that the banal record of her, him, they – so much more than a selfie. These are paintings of states of being, states of the human soul. They don’t always work. Some of the group paintings seem silly compared with the studies in solitude. But my God, what guts to reclaim figurative painting in oils, on such a stupendous scale, filling Tate Britain with the kind of art, in terms of contemporary work, that it usually goes a long way to avoid. And serious painters who stick with it improve with age. So look forward to when she’s a living old master. Although in so many ways, she already is.
Democracy is incompatible not only with the foundational elements of the human subject, but also with the various systems and institutions that support dominant forms of subjectivity or humanism in general. In other words, democracy is incompatible with structural racism and institutionalized or systemic violence; democracy is incompatible with neocolonialism and neo-imperialism; democracy is incompatible with the instruments that reproduce the conditions for and possibilities of capitalism; democracy is incompatible with race discourse, Eurocentrism, ethnocentrism, and humanism—all of which have become the dominant ways in which reality is conceptualized, interacted with, and historicized. —Meleko Mokgosi
Gagosian is pleased to present Meleko Mokgosi’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom and Europe, drawn from his grand project Democratic Intuition (2013–20).
In works of sweeping scale and scope, Mokgosi applies the principles of cinematic montage to the conventions of history painting, editing together images of political and social propaganda, religious imagery, and advertising from southern Africa and the United States to produce layers of meaning both familiar and unfamiliar. Reconceptualizing where art history, postcolonial nationhood, and democracy intersect within an interdisciplinary critical framework, Mokgosi draws attention to the many ways in which Black subjects have become unattributed objects of empire and institution.
Democratic Intuition is an eight-part epic that includes multi-panel depictions of southern African life and folklore; its title is a nod to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s theory that the functioning of democracy is dependent upon accessible education. Mokgosi engages this concept and its internal contradictions through compelling genre scenes—often involving prominent figures from public life—that jump-cut between the confines of manual work, the freedoms of intellectual enterprise, and their ties to gender and race. A parade of finely drawn characters emerges out of raw canvas backgrounds, portraying the asymmetries of power that underscore traditional divisions of labor.
One chapter in the series, Bread, Butter, and Power (2018), is an elaborate twenty-one-panel panoramic painting, wrapping around the walls of an entire gallery, that abounds with overt references to recent social and political histories, as well as diverse associations brought together imaginatively to make a conceptual point. In one panel, uniformed schoolgirls, painted in meticulous detail, till a field of soil rendered in broad abstract strokes; in another, a group of elderly South African military veterans in uniform are gathered, two women seated at the front, as if for a reunion photograph; in a third, two women in period dress embrace in an imagined domestic tableau that contains, among other visual cues, a portrait of a defiant young Harriet Tubman, dressed in the black, green, and red of the Black Liberation flag; a self-portrait by Cameroonian photographer Samuel Fosso in the guise of Black radical Angela Davis; and Mokgosi’s own protest poster in ANC colors, which refers to the people’s battle cry following the infamous Uitenhage massacre in 1985: THEY WILL NEVER KILL US ALL.
In the chapter Objects of Desire (2016–20), individual small paintings of Afrocentric beauty advertisements, Paleolithic cave paintings, and contemporary African objects are grouped together with text paintings in both English and Setswana, in which lines from museum wall labels, poems, and dinaane (oral histories) are accompanied by Mokgosi’s own critical marginalia. His annotations confront the erasure of African languages by racist policies under apartheid and reclaim these varied mother tongues. Key references for this chapter were the Museum of Modern Art’s controversial exhibitions “Primitivism” in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (1984–85) and Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life (1997), both notorious for framing historical African artworks as anonymous sources for early European modernism.
Key chapters of Democratic Intuition were brought together in a major exhibition at The School in Kinderhook, New York, during 2019–20. A catalogue documenting the entire Democratic Intuition project will be copublished by Jack Shainman Gallery and Pacific Editions at the time of the London exhibition. During the exhibition, gagosian.com will host a curriculum and a series of online international seminars organized in collaboration with the artist.
Meleko Mokgosi review – panoramic paintings brim with dazzling, complex life
A young man, little more than a boy, hands draped superciliously over the sides of his chair and with one leg fastidiously crossed over the other, stares me down from behind his dark glasses. I’d ask him to stop staring but to either side of him stand two identikit bare-chested minders in low-slung jeans and flip-flops. The hired muscle doesn’t seem to like the look of me either. Behind them all hangs a cheesy picture of Jesus with the Sacred Heart and a photo of a guy – perhaps Dad? – in a military uniform. You just want to get out of there, or move on to the next painting in Meleko Mokgosi’s Bread, Butter, and Power, a 2018 cycle of 21 large painted panels, which abut one another in larger and smaller groupings, the largest of which fills the longest wall of the biggest gallery in Mokgosi’s first UK exhibition.
I could go on all day about this one group of paintings: a woman in a sumptuous if ugly salon, holding a paper in her hand – a letter, a bill, a poem, a shopping list, who knows? – and staring off into some self-absorbed distance. Uniformed schoolgirls dig a bit of parched earth, watched over by a man with several large dogs. A guy on a bed, fully clothed, resting after work, strong daylight filtered through a curtain; Mokgosi is very good at lassitude, solitude and introspection, and the sense of things impending. Soft shadows on the wall, a patterned pillow. The man looks back at us, as if we’ve walked in uninvited.
Your eye slides over the next panel, depicting an empty room. An ugly vase on a table, a view through an open door into a corridor where, framed by the doorway, hangs a small close-up photo of two hands, belonging to different people, handcuffed together. You want to get in there to take a closer look. You want to know why. This is one of many small pictures within Mokgosi’s bigger pictures, and which play multiple roles: jokes, warnings, clues, allusions and signposts, atmosphere.
Next, another scene, another bedroom. A woman dressed in black leather (perhaps biker gear) looks at herself in a dressing table mirror, her image split by the glass. She doesn’t know we’re there. Three uniform hats with chequered bands are hung from the mirror’s frame. I guess she is a police officer. She’s also being looked at by a little blond doll, sat tucked-up in the bed behind her.
The Botswana-born, US-based artist invites lengthy discourse. There are so many underpinnings, references, repetitions, delays and self-interruptions at work in his long cycles of images and painted words, his pictures-within-pictures, his historical allusions and verbal and visual quotations and critiques, that one is likely to be overwhelmed. He presents a fragmentary anatomy of life in rich people’s houses, in township homes, schools and marketplaces in southern Africa. What Mogkosi paints, the way he paints, the stories he tells, the complexities of his thinking and its underpinnings, his intellectual position and even why he covers his cotton duck and linen canvasses with a clear coat of primer rather than multiple layers of white acrylic gesso (the phrase “white primer” is loaded with associations), and how that both constrains his technique and also gives him certain freedoms and opportunities, are all connected. Not least, it affects the way he renders black skin, with all its nuances and tonal values.
The final panel on this wall is printed with a lengthy section of text, and accompanying footnotes, by the Indian intellectual Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Spivak’s thinking on democracy and post-colonialism have been extremely influential on Mokgosi’s own development, and especially in the grand cycle of his Democratic Intuition paintings, of which Bread, Butter, and Power forms but one chapter. Partly on account of their wide-screen horizontal spread, their dissolves and jump-cuts, their frame-by-frame progression from canvas to canvas, the bleeds between scenes, the heartbeat-long patches of emptiness and sudden frames filled with text, Mokgosi’s paintings borrow much from the language of cinema. But to me they also come close to big, discursive novels. Filled with life and observation, the main themes, characters and plotlines are frequently interrupted by digressions and self-interruptions.
Of course, what you can do on a canvas is different to what a novel or a movie can do. However predetermined, images have a way of escaping intention, and open themselves up to multiple readings and approaches. Some objects appear and reappear from painting to painting – a china dog, which he uses as a kind of theatrical prop (part a MacGuffin, like the Maltese Falcon, and also like one of those familiar jugs that recur in Cézanne’s still-lifes), and a sculpture of a standing naked black woman, whose feet have been damaged, revealing the armature beneath. There are probably others. Characters, or types, come and go: teachers, officials of one sort or another, politicians, the wealthy, maids, gardeners, farmers, military men and women, people with power and people with no power at all.
Some panels of text are in Setswana, a Bantu language. The artist has said that the lack of translation of the latter is a way of honouring the stories they tell, which come from an oral tradition. Are these texts meant to be read? Or looked at as paintings of texts? Mokgosi is dealing in levels of legibility, in ambiguity, in degrees of comprehensibility and accessibility. Different audiences will see different things. All his work, perhaps, is a kind of painted text, as all allegorical paintings are. Among other works there are a number of smaller canvases in which sections of contentious art history and catalogue essays are underlined, annotated and unpicked by the artist, mostly to show their inherently racist rhetoric. I don’t think these need to be paintings.
“I never romanticise being an artist,” Mokgosi has said. “I don’t do the whisky and cigarette at 3am.” His long cycles of interrelated paintings are the product of research and planning, before painting can even begin. And once it does, there is no revision or overpainting, no starting again. What you see is the final draft. The plainness of his way of painting, avoiding expression or excess, is itself deeply calculated, idiomatic and reserved. This plainness gives the illusion of accessibility, but it is a trap. It is the place where the complications really begin.
She looks at me through leaf-shaped eyes with huge black pupils fringed by spiky lashes. Just these eyes alone say sex, without having to even look at the opulently rounded breasts, narrow waist and curvaceous hips of Amedeo Modigliani’s Reclining Nude on a White Cushion.
This is one of a spectacular array of paintings of models posing naked that Modigliani made in 1917, while war and revolution blazed in the world beyond his Paris studio. There’s a huge gathering of these women at the heart of Tate Modern’s highly enjoyable homage to modernism, beauty and love. Modigliani’s 1917 nudes, and a few later ones, all hang together in one scintillating gallery. Yet are these nudes really as radical and revolutionary – let alone feminist – as this exhibition makes out?
Sex was exploding into art all over the place in the early 20th century. Modigliani’s nudes are mild and safe compared with the work of some of his contemporaries. The nudes Egon Schiele started sketching a few years earlier, for instance, make Modigliani’s look decorous. Schiele’s models don’t just flash a neat triangle of pubic hair, which Tate Modern claims is a bold move by Modigliani. They open their legs and touch themselves. Is the appeal of Modigliani that he gives a sense of audacity without genuine filth, in the way that Schiele, Picasso and the surrealists are?
One nude reclines with her bottom towards the viewer, turning her head to look at us. Her pose is undoubtedly based on the Grande Odalisque by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, one of the most famous paintings in the Louvre, dating from 1814. But in the Ingres, we see her breast as she twists towards us, whereas Modigliani hasn’t even mastered that manoeuvre. Ingres sets his Odalisque in a harem, conjuring up disgraceful orientalist fantasies of sexual enslavement. And what’s she offering to do with her ornate feathery fan?
To make this comparison is to abandon any illusion that this wild-living Italian, who was born in 1884 and settled in Paris in 1906, was subversive in his art at all. Then again, who could ever mistake Modigliani for one of modern art’s great innovators?
This copious survey of his work, stuffed with major loans from great museums and private collections, begins with him copying Cézanne and ends with him still copying Cézanne – plus a few others. He had a great eye for what the geniuses of his time were doing and a bare-faced cheek in stealing from them. The black almonds the critic Beatrice Hastings has for eyes under her big feathery hat, in a 1915 painting entitled Madame de Pompadour, look strange and startling – if you have never seen Matisse’s Madame Matisse, painted two years before. And where did his lover Jeanne Hébuterne get that tapered mask with its long triangular nose? It is lifted straight from Picasso’s 1907 masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
The weakness of Modigliani is not just that he imitates painters who were already well on their way to changing art for ever. It is that he lacks the searching restlessness of these great modernists. He’s happy to add a mask here, a distortion there, in portraits that are conventional in spirit. Thus in 1916 he does a series of portraits of the art dealer Paul Guillaume, playing about with his face in a clever way without ever producing anything except a very stylish portrait. This was a cunning move, for Guillaume was an innately conservative art lover whose flirtation with the new was skin deep and who would champion a “call to order” in French art.
This is a gorgeous exhibition about a slightly silly artist. Modigliani’s true self was shaped, surely, before he ever left Tuscany, the region of Leonardo and Botticelli. An almost Renaissance passion for beauty glows in his drawings of caryatids – architectural columns given the form of female statues – and his elegant sculpted heads.
Where Picasso saw “the primitive” in African art, Modigliani translates that raw threat back into something classical and calm. His nudes are not so different in the end from Titian’s Venus of Urbino. “LHOOQ,” wrote Duchamp under an image of the Mona Lisa, a piece of wordplay meaning: “She’s got a hot arse.” He might have sniggered the same thing among these hallowed icons to good taste.
Fans of the photographic uncanny are in for a great summer: first Cindy Sherman lands at the NPG, and now Canadian weirdo Jeff Wall has arrived at White Cube. Wall by name, wall by nature, he’s known for his epically scaled, carefully orchestrated set-ups, which have all the complexity of a movie, only they don’t – you know – move. This set of works is more of a pick ’n’ mix, though. Some are classic Wall: a child curls up asleep on the sidewalk as her dad looks on and passers-by affect indifference. A giant diptych of a couple in bedwear having two kinds of communication breakdown is trumped by a gianter triptych, ‘The Gardens’, which has a different couple and their doubles in a strange, hallucinatory landscape of woodland, garden and maze. The effect of these works is to make you question both photography and looking at photography. You can’t not look at them – they’re too big and intrusive – but by looking you become complicit in their (sometimes silly) internal logic. You become part of the joke, or whatever it is.
But there are other works here that achieve a similarly disconcerting effect by less flashy means. ‘Weightlifter’ (2015) is just that: a big black-and-white photo of a guy hefting a barbell. It has a beautiful, chiaroscuro quality, but its mystery is that there is no mystery: it’s just a guy, any guy, doing a simple action. So why do we have this urge to complicate it? Even better is ‘Daybreak’ (2011), showing Bedouin olive pickers sleeping outdoors in the Israeli desert before (presumably) a day of backbreaking labour. The image is ancient and contemporary, deathly and a small piece of everyday life. In the distance, ghostly in the dawn light, is a huge prison complex. A road snakes from the slumbering workers towards it. Is it their future? Their past? Our future, maybe? Wall invites you to fill in these stories, but you’ll never know if you’re right.
Here is rain at the window running down the pane on a sunny July afternoon. In the early morning light, another window frame appears, a projected apparition cast on a blank wall. Ripples of amber-tinted water slop back and forth in low trays on the floor, the sound slightly muffled by a huge wall entirely covered in reindeer lichen, the frizzy, greyish-green branches giving off a slight acidic tang. We are in the world of Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson.
Then there is the fog, a long corridor of it, whose luminous density is broken by an amorphous flare of magenta as the cones and rods in your eyes tire of the yellow-lit mist, and begin projecting its complementary colour into the atmosphere. The stain hangs in the air while you walk through, the floor slick with vapour. Before the introduction of the Clean Air Act, peasoupers were common in our cities. I only encounter the smogs of my youth in galleries nowadays, or at overblown rock concerts. Eliasson’s is the fifth work involving fog I’ve seen in the last three months alone, but it is the prettiest, and was first made in 2010. Nevertheless, there ought to be a moratorium. Another fog work is meant to swathe a couch just outside the show’s entrance, but it had cleared on my visit, or was yet to settle.
There is more to Eliasson’s work than cheap thrills and damp air. He is an inventor, architect, splitter of light if not of actual atoms, universalist, artist – an all-round Renaissance man. In the catalogue to this large and impressively varied exhibition Eliasson communes with scientists, philosophers, professors of economics, neuroscience and anthropology. He talks with Denmark’s most provocative chef, René Redzepi; with ex-president of Ireland and author of Climate Justice Mary Robinson; and with hip-hop pioneer Fab Five Freddy. All this is fascinating and, in its way, rather brilliant. Eliasson is full of curiosity. He has spoken at Davos and sat down with the Dalai Lama. As curator Mark Godfrey puts it, Eliasson is a new model of artist. Godfrey precedes his discussion of the work with a lengthy list of Eliasson’s recent and current projects. You wonder there’s time to make any art.
In one of the notes, articles and other material covering a long wall in one of the final rooms of the show, Eliasson writes that “We need to move beyond the failure-success dichotomy to embrace new, non-quantifiable criteria for what is a good work of art.” For him, I think, “good” means generative, and moving beyond the production of objects into a discourse with the world itself. He encourages us to read his work as entering the frame of geopolitics, climate emergency, and all the issues – from food production to fossil fuel – that flow from that. Where his art is at its most entertaining, he also wants to effect a change in consciousness, and the ways in which we perceive the world and our place in it. Hence, the optical and other perceptual phenomena we encounter in his work are intended to alert and sensitise us to our place on the planet, as agents as much as spectators.
There’s a whiff of metaphysics in all this, and a suspicion that what isn’t all smoke and mirrors, is all talk. Eliasson’s art, for all its fleeting pleasures – whether it is the highly produced giant kaleidoscopes that spangle the walls with complex and colourful patterns, or which have our reflections sheared and reduplicated in fractal shards, or a work that splits and multiplies our shadows on a far wall – is all I think intended to make us aware of our bodily presence. His earlier one-liners – a spinning electric fan, slung from its cable, that whirrs overhead, might have more going on than mere visual amusement, but it is hard to see quite what.
But sometimes the spectacle can be startling, if not ravishing. Gouts of water from a fountain freeze in the flash of a strobe, molten and solidified for an instant. A thin curtain of rain hangs in the spotlit dark, shimmering like the aurora borealis. Another spotlight casts an empty circle on the floor. You can be a wannabe star for a moment, then move on. Sometimes it is just an art whose pleasures you don’t need to think about too much.
Revealing the mechanics of his works doesn’t make it less wondrous. Without the tells, it would all just be cheesy and overly theatrical. When Eliasson filled the Tate Modern Turbine Hall with his hazy sunrise in 2003, it was evident how the trick was performed, but it didn’t stop visitors gathering on the concrete floor to gaze up, to spell out phrases with their bodies, and look at themselves in the reflective mylar ceiling hung high in the vast void. I always thought museum staff on the balconies should monitor spectators for signs of inappropriate ecstasy, and take them out, one by one.
One thing the work did inspire was a sense of communality. Arriving at level two of Tate Modern, everyone looks hideous, their skin tones horribly altered by the yellow lighting overhead; this sickness as a trick of the light is a deliberately sour note to a show much concerned with optical wonders and visual puzzles. Only when we come to photographs of Iceland’s retreating glaciers, and a bronze block cast from the space left from a melted chunk of glacial ice, do intimations of the uncertain future start to kick-in.
But where is all this leading, I asked myself? Where does my body belong, me with my dirty carbon footprint, my innate cynicism, my impatience with fog and mirrors, as I watch the temporary waterfall cascading down its scaffolding cliff outside, from the comfort of the Tate Modern terrace cafe, where wholesome, nutritious fare of the sort Eliasson’s chefs provide at his Berlin studio is currently being served? Is this the new sort of artist, a new kind of art? We have been here before, and we shall go there again.
The weakness of Modigliani is not just that he imitates painters who were already well on their way to changing art for ever. It is that he lacks the searching restlessness of these great modernists. He’s happy to add a mask here, a distortion there, in portraits that are conventional in spirit. Thus in 1916 he does a series of portraits of the art dealer Paul Guillaume, playing about with his face in a clever way without ever producing anything except a very stylish portrait. This was a cunning move, for Guillaume was an innately conservative art lover whose flirtation with the new was skin deep and who would champion a “call to order” in French art.
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