Man Ray: Portraits

National Portrait Gallery

7 February – 27 May 2013

Le violin d'Ingres. Museum Ludwig Cologne, Photography Collections (Collection Gruber)
© Man Ray Trust / ADAGP © Copy Photograph Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Some definitive portraits, but not enough to deserve an entire show, especially given the routine quality of many of the other images.

First off, as a record of European modernist pioneers, particularly in Paris, this exhibition is wonderful. The artist seems to have known, and photographed, everyone. He also has a talent for capturing either the intensity, or surprising lack of it, in some of his subjects.

Here is wide-eyed Picasso (over several decades), there is plump stately Matisse. On one side we are in the brooding presence of Schoenberg, in a timeless expressionist image reminiscent of his own mask-like painted portraits; on the opposite side we party with the ravishing Peggy Guggenheim, evoking the high hopes and new freedoms of her era.

Next, as expected, some surrealistic images, including portraits of muse and student Lee Miller and Ray himself, especially one of him sleeping under a female torso. But these are period pieces.

Then, we notice the size of the prints. Sometimes familiar images are revealed to be smaller (or larger) than we expect. It isn’t clear whether these historic prints reflect Ray’s intentions – there is an example of him producing two different crops for an image, which suggest he had some interest in this, though I didn’t notice much difference.

Some of the later colour portraits are printed so small as to part of the portrait miniature tradition, and presumably this was Ray’s intention. But hardly an inspired idea, and the actual portraits are bland fashion images.

And the fashion portraits are especially dull, and comprise too much of the exhibition, as if hackwork must be displayed simply to prove he did it.

The relation between cinema and photography seems particularly striking looking at these portraits. Perhaps directors and actors were influenced by the poses in Ray’s photos, but it mostly seems the other way around.

So the stilted unsmiling images of the silent era give way to disarmingly self-confident images of the 1960s, with variations recorded between these periods. 

Overall, a curiosity rather than a living body of work.

Perspectives on collage

Photographers' Gallery 18 January - 7 April 2013

'Untitled' by CK Rajan. From here.

Useful exhibition on what works and what doesn't in collage.

As a sample of collage work from 8 artists, it would be unfair to comment extensively on any one artist, as the work here surely is not representative. The curators nonetheless have an impressively ambitious aim, being both to survey the use of collage an broaden what we regard as collage to include, for example, several installations.

So it seems appropriate to try to draw some conclusions abut contemporary use of collage. I have four.

1. Information overload. Collage can reflect the new 'neon age' of excessive information, where everything is available all the time, but we don't know how to process it. Batia Suter's 'wave, floor version #1' is an example here. The literary antecedent that sprang to mind was Borges' conceptual parody of Drayton's Poly-Albion, as a poet attempts to describe all the flora, fauna, and things of his homeland.

2. Satire. Not specifically a contemporary idea (unlike 1 above) but photo manipulation is ideally suited to satire. CK Rajan's commentaries on the poverty and riches in India are the most powerfully charged works in this exhibition, despite their small size.

3. Abstraction. Arranging and layering found objects, whether three-dimensional objects or photographs, encourages abstraction. Here, both Anna Parkina and Nicole Wermers produced some beautiful simple works, mostly around geometric patterns.

4. Cubism. Interestingly, the oldest artist here, Jan Svoboda (died 1990), is the only one to use collage as originally introduced to high art, as a way to detach us from a single perspective.

These were the four themes I found illuminating. Clunie Reid's work seemed banal and childish, while Peggy Franck was represented by two modest works that left no impression on me. Roy Arden's dadist collages did contain a style, one that I might have added to the four above, but I also found them pinched and irrelevant (and so missing the humour of the original dada).

I'd expect collage to become increasingly prominent as a medium, as our information age becomes more intolerable. But satire is possibly the most appropriate use of collage, alongside cubism, though the latter appears to be an entirely exhausted movement.

Photography vs painting: 2 exhibitions

Seduced by Art

National Gallery, 31 October 2012 – 20 January 2012

Rothko/Sugimoto

Pace Gallery, 4 October – 17 November 2012

Irini II, photograph by Bettina von Zwehl.

 

Exhibitions trying to promote photographs over paintings only reveal the weaknesses in the former medium.

The National Gallery exhibition specifically attempts to display the influence of painting, specifically oil painting, on photographers. The private Pace Gallery only compares Mark Rothko’s paintings and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs, though as the Rothkos are from private collections and not for sale, I assume we are supposed to be concentrating on the photographs.

Primed by Brian Sewell’s ferocious attack on ‘Seduced by Art’, I didn’t have high expectations, but I left feeling the old curmudgeon had gone a little too far. That said, it is easy to think the curators were biased against photography from the outset – to be seduced by art implies photography is not itself art.

As if the title were a self-fulfilling prophecy, most of the photographs are indeed poor art. This isn’t a case of good photographers being trumped by great painters, as it might easily have been: many of the paintings for comparison were also poor. But any of them had greater intrinsic interest than most of the photographs.

In contrast, at the Pace I felt that the curators did Sugimoto no service by inviting comparison with Rothko.

Overall, both exhibitions rest on a false premise: that photography and oil painting are simply two different forms of visual art, much as oil paintings might hang next to drawings.

This assumption seems fairest with still life, which celebrates the mere technique of the oil painter in depicting things. A good photographer can do the same. This seems to confirm John Berger’s  idea that advertising photos continue the oil painting tradition, in stressing the tangibility, and perhaps desirability, of objects.

But everwhere else, and even in the best painted still lifes, there is the critical difference of composition.

A painter, with whatever technique, be it watercolour, fresco or computer generated images, must choose what to include, and can change details as necessary.

A photograph is first of all a record of something. The photographer can control composition to some extent, but almost every line and contrast and the way these connect is given, and cannot be changed without massive intervention.

Even portraits, where photos have taken precedence over paint, are very different depending on the medium. A good photo portrait, like any photo, captures a moment. A painting must necessarily capture something different, and in the greatest portraits it seems to depict a context, or the inner life.

As you’d expect, this difference is clearest in the landscapes at the National, where even the trickiest modern efforts, digitally compiling a view, are nonetheless required to be a documentary. This is how the sky looked, or could look like.

Sugimoto supposedly photographs landscapes, but they are so treated as to make them effectively abstract slabs of dark or light. In this respect, I agree with the curators that he is aiming for something similar to Rothko, in whose hands landscapes became completely abstract, and the communicative aspect became intensely, almost too intensely, direct.

On its own, some of Sugimoto’s work is very effective. But despite apparent similarity with Rothko, the painter is much more powerful. Part of this is due to the irritating symmetry of the planes in the photographs compared to Rothko. But comparing the symmetrical Untitled, 1969 with the photos, I was struck by the differences in texture. Some of this is even captured in the comparison (a photo, so limited) offered by the Pace here.

 

The painting is composed. As we can see the brush strokes, we know it has been composed. That the artist wanted precisely this effect, at this point. I perceive the overwhelming effect of a Rothko being this sense of struggling to communicate. Sugimoto doesn't achieve this.

 

Some of the finest photos in Seduced by Art exploit this difference between the media. An image cheekily entitled ‘the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, depicting various reproductions, and being itself one, is amusing. A photo of people looking at a painting in such a way that they merge with the painting’s scene, is an ingenious trompe l’oiel. 

 

National Gallery I, London 1989, by Thomas Struth. From Tate.

 

Another image arrestingly highlights the texture of Goya’s portrait of Wellington, while perhaps the finest are von Zwehl's two tiny portraits of a woman, where the lighting is so careful that for once it feels that a photo is ‘painting realistic’ rather than the other way round.

 

It’s a shame that Sugimoto’s photos weren’t displayed at the larger exhibition, as they would have illustrated that photography can indeed convey the same power as painting, in the hands of a serious, fine artist.