Last Week: RB Kitaj at the Jewish Museum, Camden and 21-23 June: Teignmouth Folk Festival

Just a quick post to say that it is the last week of the RB Kitaj exhibition at the Jewish Museum in London. This is part of the Obsessions exhibition which previously showed at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. The other part is showing at the Pallant Gallery in Chichester and also finishes on the 16th June.

I saw the London exhibition a couple of weeks ago and, although it is relatively small, it is well worth the trip out to Camden to see work by a man who attended art school alongside Caulfield, Hockney and Blake, and was friends with Bacon, Auerbach and Freud. The museum has prepared a  Kitaj Trail leaflet which contains informative links between the Kitaj works and other exhibits in the museum.

Teignmouth Folk Festival

The good weather has come just in time for the Teignmouth Folk Festival which runs from 21st to 23rd June. The programme of over a dozen performers is now available on the Festival website and tickets can also be obtained in advance from there.

The sun shining on the Teignmouth Folk Festival 2006

The Festival is in its 15th year and usually has something for everyone, with Morris dancers and a number of free events, in addition to the the bigger acts in the main venues.

Lucian Freud at the NPG - Finishes May 27th

The Lucian Freud Portraits exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery finishes this weekend. Freud was born in Germany in 1922 but came to England in 1933 when his family fled the Nazis.

He enlisted with the merchant navy during the Second World War but was discharged after illness. After the war it was a trio of paintings of his first wife Kitty Garman that first established him.

Kitty Garman

The early paintings see Freud developing his style and the subjects seem to have larger-than-life eyes (rather like those stylised large-eyed portraits of  children in the 1960s and those by Margaret Keane).

'Small naked portrait' at the Ashmolean

Remarkably quickly, however, Freud found his realist style and subsequent pictures appear stylistically very consistent, with their trademark reds and greens giving a livid appearance to the flesh. Freud spent hundreds of hours on each of his pictures and photos of his studio show it quite spartan apart from the splodges of paint where he removed the excess from his brushes and the sheets that he used to wipe them.

The Freud studio with model, picture and dog

Painting Leigh Bowery

The exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was being planned when he died at the age of 88 in July 2011 and is essential viewing for anyone interested in figurative portraiture in the late 20th century.

After painting David Hockney

The gallery space at the NPG is bit cramped, especially given the number of people trying to see the works, and it does not flow particularly well, but the works themselves are a revelation for anyone who has only seen reproductions or the occasional Freud elsewhere (such as that at the Ashmolean).

His last (unfinished) painting

There are some links to the exhibition (video etc) here in my previous post about it. You can also access a 'proper' recent review of the exhibition at the A kick up the arts blog here.

Lucian Freud 1922 - 2011

You have until Sunday if you want to see this exhibition (although it may already theoretically be 'sold out').

A Top 10 of Popular 20th Century Artists?

I keep intending to write about exhibitions I've attended recently but ... instead, prompted by the discussions we've been having at the Phoenix Ism's group, I thought I'd do a "best-of" or "most popular" top ten list for 20th century artists. Nerdy or what? The first couple are easy enough but from then on it becomes more than a bit subjective - so, basically, I've taken the key factors as originality and continuing influence (and some personal prejudice). This is what I came up with:

The three dancers - Picasso

1 - Pablo Picasso - No explanation needed.

Nude descending a staircase - Duchamp

2 - Marcel Duchamp - Innovator and inventor of "readymades".

Marilyn - Warhol

3 - Andy Warhol - Innovator and hugely influential in a range of media.

The temptation of St Anthony - Dali

4 - Salvador Dali - Showman, technically brilliant, clever ideas cleverly realised.

The dessert: Harmony in red - Matisse

5 - Henri Matisse -  A large variety of modern work including cutouts. Copies of his prints are still hugely popular.

The two Fridas - Frida Kahlo

6 - Frida Kahlo - Stark portrayal of the pain and harsh lives of women. Highly personal self portraits. Iconic.

Reclining woman with green stockings - Schiele

7 - Egon Schiele - Tortured genius, producing intense drawings and paintings.

Composition no 2 - Mondrian

8 - Piet Mondrian - Pioneer of grid-based pictures, Art theorist, joint founder of De Stijl and inventor of neoplasticism.

Red wedge - Lissitzky

9 - The Constructivists - I'm cheating here, counting the constructivists as one - but they would have understood. Literally, a revolutionary approach to graphic design.

Babe Rainbow - Peter Blake

10 - The Brits: Blake/Hockney/Hamilton/Bacon/Freud/Riley/Emin - Cheating again: I'm a huge fan of each of these but it would be unrealistic to place any one of them in the top ten - wouldn't it?

A bigger splash - David Hockney

Anyway, that's it - Not very satisfying as it leaves out so many great artists (whole movements in fact): Braque, Cezanne, Kandinsky and the Blue Rider, Modigliani, Hopper, Frank Stella, Lichtenstein and the other pop artists, Man Ray and the surrealists, the Expressionists, Paula Rego, the St Ives artists, performance artists from Beuys to Yoko Ono, and so on ... And Dali at number 4? ... Oh well

5 Must-see Exhibitions 2012: Grayson Perry, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Picasso and Breon O'Casey

I still haven't really got very far updating the blog - so here instead is a short list of exhibitions that I hope to get to, and which you might like, in the next few weeks (update 26/2/12: have now been to all of these - all well worth seeing - will post more shortly)

1.  At the British Museum Grayson Perry: the Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman  is extended to 26 February 2012. Perry has curated a unique show of his own work and selected material from the British Museum, as this short video explains.

If you want to see more, Tim Marlow has done one of his 30 minute programmes discussing the aims of the exhibition with Perry.  The programme is showing from 11 February on Sky Arts 1.

Lucian Freud's first wife, Kitty

2. Lucian Freud Portraits is on at the National Portrait Gallery 9 Feb – 27 May 2012. See a short video here on YouTube. As it says on the NPG website: "Lucian Freud was one of the most important and influential artists of his generation ... and this major exhibition, spanning over seventy years, is the first to focus on his portraiture." See my previous post re Lucian Freud and my follow-up post. Tim Marlow has also reviewed this show on Sky Arts.

3.  At the Royal Academy of Arts: David Hockney - A Bigger Picture is showing from 21 January to 9 April 2012. Now in his 70s, Hockney, along with Peter Blake, is a survivor from the 1960s - but one who has continued to explore new avenues throughout his career and who enjoys widespread popularity. The following video by the curator Marco Livingstone explains how the exhibition was put together:

Further related Hockney videos can be viewed here. Also Sky Arts is showing a Tim Marlow programme about the exhibit and on 27/2/12 Andrew Marr is doing an hour long programme. According to the website this exhibition "spans a 50 year period to demonstrate Hockney’s long exploration and fascination with the depiction of landscape." However, Hockney is adamant that it is not a retrospective but focuses mainly on work produced during the past 3-4 years (confirmed by visiting the exhibition - only one gallery was devoted to Hockney's previous landscape work).

4. At Tate Britain there is a Picasso exhibition. Picasso and Modern British Art focuses on how Picasso was influenced by the English and how, in turn, English painters - from Ben Nicholson to David Hockney - were influenced by him. “The exhibition will show how Picasso evolved from an artist championed by a courageous minority in Britain, to become the figurehead of modern art both here and around the world.” according to the curator. It looks as though it will be a fascinating exploration, and it runs from 15 February to 15 July 2012. Tim Marlow is doing a 30 min programme on the exhibition that will be showing in March on Sky Arts.

5. Finally, if you are in Cornwall you should take the opportunity to see the exhibition of Breon O'Casey's work at the Newlyn Gallery 14th January - 28th April 2012. This is a major show of paintings, prints, sculptures, weavings and jewellery by Breon selected by his daughter, Duibhne Gough, and covers his output from the 1950s to 2011. It includes notebooks, photographs and other artefacts. Prints & works on paper will be available for sale in the Picture Room. See my previous post about O'Casey and Barbara Hepworth.