Latest news with #Cubism
Perth Now
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Cézanne the modernist influencer in NGA blockbuster
Modernist artworks from Germany's Museum Berggruen are on show in Australia for the first time, including big names such as Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso. Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen is the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra's winter blockbuster show. The museum collection has been touring internationally while its Berlin building is closed for renovation, and the exhibition has already visited half a dozen cities and been viewed by about a million people. But the Australian version is different - it's no out-of-the-box show, instead integrating art from giants of European modernism with works by Australian artists. The result is a story of the dynamic exchange of 20th century artistic ideas over decades and across the world, and the development of modernism in Australia. "I think it is the most accomplished and the most meaningful venue so far in the entire tour in terms of research into art history, because of this dialogue," said the head of Museum Berggruen, Dr Gabriel Montua. More than 80 works from the museum sit alongside 75 works from the national collection, by artists such as Russell Drysdale, Grace Cossington Smith and Dorrit Black. The exhibition opens with Cézanne's experiments in form and perspective, on show with works by Australian artists like Drysdale and Ian Fairweather, who were influenced by his innovations. Rarely seen works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque show the breakthroughs of Cubism, hung with Australian artists such as Dorrit Black, Grace Crowley and Roy de Maistre. There are sections devoted to Paul Klee, Dora Maar and Henri Matisse, while a sculpture by Giacometti measuring more than two metres high represents the first time a such large scale Giacometti has been displayed down under. All of the artists in the exhibition ultimately come back to Cézanne's innovations, according to NGA curator David Greenhalgh. "He is the figurehead who inspired so much of what came after," said Greenhalgh. "There's a real sense of a lot of these artists looking at one another and deriving inspiration from one another." The Berggruen collection is the life's work of art dealer Heinz Berggruen, who fled Germany before World War II and sold his collection to the German state in 2000, ensuring it would be available to the public. Many of the artists he collected were deliberately removed from German art collections, because they were deemed degenerate during the Nazi reign. The exhibition opens Saturday and runs till September 21. AAP travelled to Canberra with the assistance of the National Gallery of Australia.
Spectator
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Douglas Cooper – a complex character with a passion for Cubism
The collector, art historian and critic Douglas Cooper (1911-84) relished conflict. He was a formidable man, loud in speech and dress, with forceful views and a taste for ridicule. He could also be very funny. John Richardson, Picasso's biographer, who knew Cooper better than most, said it was as though an angel and a demon child were perpetually fighting for control of his personality. Physically robust, Cooper survived being stabbed in the stomach when he was 50 after unwisely propositioning a French soldier. He is remembered today, if at all, for his legendary collection of Cubist art, focusing on the four greats of the movement: Picasso, Braque, Léger and Gris. His taste was backed by intense scholarship and he was one of the earliest collectors of Cubism, a rare passion for an Englishman. He was a man of independent thought and opinions, though prey to paranoia and self-indulgent tantrums. He was apparently asked to resign from the Reform Club four times because of bad behaviour. Francis Bacon, with whom he had a very typical falling out, called him 'a prissy old voluptuary'. This complex figure is the subject of a new book which claims to be an objective biography. It is enriched by having two authors, although there is inevitably a degree of overlap between their texts. The first part is more or less straight biography, by Adrian Clark. The tone is relentlessly disapproving, a clear dislike of Cooper extending to his quondam partner Richardson. Clark calls Cooper a sociopath, a malign, vindictive and wilful person. He claims that the book 'displays' Cooper's life, rather than judges it, but he repeatedly tells us how unpleasant the man was.
Irish Examiner
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: Irish women who were ahead of their time
Few artistic relationships have been as long or productive as that maintained by Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone. In London, Paris and their native Dublin, they created some of the most innovative Irish art of the early 20th century, often in the face of critical opprobrium and the bewilderment of their peers. A broad selection of their work as pioneers of abstraction and Cubism in this country is currently showing at the National Gallery of Ireland, in the exhibition Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship The two had much in common. Both came from well-to-do Protestant families, and they were born just a few miles apart, Hone in Donnybrook, Co Dublin in 1894, and Jellett in Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin city centre in 1897. 'But their personal experience was a little different,' says the exhibition's curator, Dr Brendan Rooney. 'Hone's parents both died in her childhood, whereas Jellett's family were what you might call more conventionally secure. 'Also, Hone contracted polio at the age of 12, which left her very compromised. A lot of her early years, and particularly her teen years, were spent undergoing various medical procedures in England and elsewhere. "So it was really tough for her, notwithstanding her privilege.' Both determined early to pursue careers in art. Jellett studied under William Orpen at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, before proceeding to the Westminster Technical Institute in London. It was there that she first encountered Hone, who had already spent some years in London, studying at the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts. At the launch of Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship at the National Gallery were Dr Brendan Rooney, head curator; Niamh McNally, curator; and Dr Caroline Campbell, director. Picture: Naoise Culhane 'At Westminster,' says Rooney, 'they would have had a very academic training, with an emphasis on drawing. Both studied under Walter Sickert, among others.' Hone moved to Paris in late 1920, and Jellett followed a few months later. Both were keen to explore new ways of art making. 'They set themselves up as students in this incredible, creative, post-war environment. I think it was in Paris that their friendship really began.' Initially, they studied under André Lhote, but they soon bored of his brand of representational Cubism, which mainly dealt with landscapes and still life. 'Abstraction was where they wanted to go,' says Rooney. 'It was more extreme, and more reductive, I suppose, as an art form. So they approached Albert Gleizes, and asked that he become their tutor. Gleizes had just turned 40. He was still in the process of formulating his own aesthetic and his own ideas and his own philosophy about art, and probably the last thing he needed was two overenthusiastic Irish students arriving on his doorstep.' Gleizes had no other students. 'So Jellett and Hone moved into this much more intimate situation, where they became his collaborators, really, and played a key role in the formulation of his ideas.' Jellett and Hone travelled back and forth from Paris to exhibit in Dublin, where their work was often seen as controversial, and never more so than when Jellett exhibited a painting called Decoration at a Society of Dublin Painters exhibition in 1923. 'Decoration was met with anything from suspicion to downright hostility,' says Rooney. 'George Russell - a painter himself, as well as a writer and critic - was among the most outspoken critics. He dismissed Jellett's work as 'artistic malaria.' The Irish Times published a photograph of Decoration and a photograph of an onion side by side, and described her painting as a 'freak.' I mean, this was a really hostile and adversarial sort of language.' Evie Hone, The Cock and Pot. The two artists responded to the disparagement of their work in markedly different ways. 'Jellett was emboldened. She really turned to proselytizing about modernism. She lectured. She wrote. She was very industrious. But Hone, I think, was crushed by the criticism. She became more reserved. She even joined an Anglican convent for a year or so. Jellett would not have approved, but she was on hand to collect her friend when she left in January or February of 1927.' In time, Jellett and Hone's work became more accepted in Irish art circles. Jellett was even invited to design a series of murals for the Ireland Pavilion at the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow in 1937. Hone, meanwhile, took an interest in stained glass. She retrained at the College of Art and joined An Túr Gloine, the workshop and co-operative founded by Sarah Purser. Before long, she took on a number of significant commissions in the medium. One of the best known is My Four Green Fields, commissioned by the Department of Industry and Commerce for the Irish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The window now dominates the entrance hall of Government Buildings on Merrion St, Dublin. In Britain, Hone is celebrated for another work in stained glass, a magnificent Crucifixion in the Chapel at Eton College, Windsor, which she completed between 1949 and 1952. 'That was her magnum opus,' says Rooney. 'It was a colossal undertaking, involving thousands of individual pieces of glass, which she manufactured in Dublin and had shipped over. The window was incredibly well received, and is now accepted as being one of the finest pieces of stained glass created anywhere in the world in the 20th century.' Despite their success, the two never really became establishment figures. Towards the end of her life, Jellett founded the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, which challenged the dominance of the Royal Hibernian Academy's invariably conservative annual group exhibition. Hone was also involved, along with Norah McGuinness, Fr Jack Hanlon, Hilary Heron and Louis le Brocquy. Mainie Jellett, The Virgin of Éire. Sadly, Jellett fell ill with cancer and could not attend the first Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1943. 'It's one of the great injustices that she never got to see it,' says Rooney. 'And she died before the second exhibition the following year.' Hone continued to work until her own passing, in 1955. The Irish Exhibition of Living Art outlived them both, surviving into the early 1990s. From the first, Jellett and Hone had insisted that older, more conservative artists – RHA stalwarts such as Seán Keating and James Sleator – be featured alongside younger, bolder creatives, and successive organisers were loyal to that spirit of broadmindedness. 'Jellett and Hone were aware of the importance of the collective,' says Rooney. 'They were inclusive, and emphatically so. They managed to bring people with them, which takes real skill, particularly in a Europe that was fragmented for all sorts of cultural, political reasons. It's a very impressive achievement.' Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship runs at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, until August 10. Further information:
The Independent
12-05-2025
- Science
- The Independent
New snail species with shell shaped like Picasso's art discovered
A tiny new snail species discovered in Thailand has been named after legendary artist Pablo Picasso, due to the strange, complex geometric patterns seen on its shell. The species, measuring only 3 millimetres (0.1 in) in size, has been named Anauchen picasso owing to the rectangularly angled whorls on its shell. These whorl patterns 'look like a cubist interpretation of other snails with 'normal' shell shapes,' prompting researchers to name it after Picasso. 'This species looks like an Anauchen with rounded whorls painted in a Pablo Picasso -style resembling the art style known as Cubism,' scientists wrote in the study, published in the journal ZooKeys. Its brown, conical shell consists of 4.5–5 whorls separated by a deep suture, scientists say. There are several irregularly spaced whitish streaks crossing the shell's spiral. The research describes 46 new species of microsnails from Cambodia Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. These are tiny land snails with shell sizes less than 5 mm, found mostly in Southeast Asia, including former Indochina, Indonesia, and the Philippines, as well as parts of China. Their distribution extends further westwards, across India to Pakistan, with significantly reduced diversity. Researchers also propose a new method to classify snails by sorting them into similar groups based on overall shell shape, shell surface texture, and the arrangement of apertural barriers. Many of the new species were collected only recently, while several others were discovered in the collection of the Florida Museum of Natural History, having been collected in the 1980s. 'Although the shell sizes of these snails are less than 5 mm, they are real beauties! Their shells exhibit extraordinary complexity,' scientists say. 'For example, the aperture ('opening' of the shell) is armed with numerous tooth-like barriers, which are most probably useful against predators,' they explained. Several of the new species were found to have an aperture that turns either upwards or downwards, meaning some species carry their shells upside-down. Researchers were able to distinguish the different snails based on the apertural barriers and the orientation of the last whorl on the shell. Scientists caution that the locations where some of the snails were found in the 1980s may have already been destroyed by deforestation and limestone quarrying. The study highlights these major threats that locally endemic land snails face in Southeast Asia.
Telegraph
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
How two French sisters rescued their great-grandmother from history
At first glance, Gabriële Buffet's life story seems to fit a depressingly familiar template: a brilliant young woman meets an egotistical man and finds her artistic ambitions swept aside by his; a talent becomes a muse. Born in 1881, Buffet launched into life with a fierce intelligence and utter disdain for male attention. By autumn 1898, aged 17, she had become the only woman authorised to study musical composition at the elite Schola Cantorum in Paris. Her next stop was Berlin, where she met the composer Edgard Varèse, the first of many men to be inspired by her radical views on music and art. Then, at 27, in Paris, Buffet met the 30-year-old impressionist painter Francis Picabia. Wildly impulsive – and, it now seems probable, suffering from undiagnosed manic depression – Picabia was immediately intoxicated by her 'rebel' intelligence and invited her on a road trip to Brittany. For Buffet, it was a potentially life-defining moment: getting in the car would mean abandoning the orchestra with which she played in Berlin. But, as her granddaughters Anne and Claire Berest put it in their collaborative novel Gabriële, 'it is unthinkable to resist someone like Francis Picabia'. Buffet got in the car. Within months, they were married and she was pregnant with their first child. 'Gabriële's musical career ended,' the Berests write, 'when she met Francis Picabia.' And yet, speaking over Zoom from Anne's home in the seventh arrondissement of Paris (Claire, at 42 the younger sister by three years, lives an hour from the French capital in Estampes) the sisters tell me that their great-grandmother's story does not benefit from what they call a 'feminist sheen'. Gabriële was no victim, they insist, and Picabia did not exploit her. Rather, she was, by choice, a conduit for the genius of others. Or, as one of many personal interludes in the book – which combines fact with fiction – has it: 'What's so troubling about her is that no one prevented her from being famous or successful. She was the one who wanted to be forgotten.' 'She had no ego, unlike the men,' says Claire. But she did have an eye for talent and the 'new', and helped to steer entire artistic movements, from Cubism to Dada. Today, Claire suggests, Buffet would have likely been a 'visionary gallerist, who shaped the art scene, someone like Gertrude Stein'. For example, when she and Picabia travelled to America at the height of his fame, Buffet – who spoke fluent English, while Picabia spoke none – took control of his interviews with the press. Such interviews would go on to define Picabia's legacy. 'Everything 'he' says about painting,' the Berests write, 'harks back to music, so much so that art critics and historians will speak of a 'musicalist' period in his work.' It is clear, for instance, that the following sentence, attributed to Picabia, was really hers: 'I simply equilibrise in colour or shadow tones the sensations which those things give me. They are like the motifs in symphonic music.' In France, the Berests are literary stars. Anne's novel The Postcard, about Jewish relatives who died in Auschwitz, was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize, in 2021. Claire's 2020 novel about Frida Kahlo, Rien n'est noir, won the Elle Readers' Grand Prize. What made them decide to come together to write about their great-grandmother? 'In fact,' says Claire, smiling, 'we had always wanted to write together, to… how do you say…?' She looks at Anne mischievously, who answers: 'Play together!' They had been searching for the 'right' subject for years. Then, in 2013, Anne read a biography of Marcel Duchamp in which Gabriële Buffet was named as the artist's first love, when he was 24 and she 30 (and still married to Picabia). She went on to make him a name overseas. 'And we had no idea!' Claire marvels. After three years of research, they realised the extent to which their great-grandmother had been overlooked by art historians, despite the archives being full of contemporary references to her influence on the avant-garde. 'Apollinaire, Duchamp, Stravinsky, Calder, Picasso – they all had things to say about her,' says Anne. 'And we made sure to include all our research in the footnotes because we wanted to prove that what we were saying was true.' They take care, too, to set Picabia's story straight, both with regards to their great-grandmother – 'ultimately [he] could never have forced Gabriële to do anything she didn't want to do' – and to his own legacy, which has become tainted by accusations that he held unsavoury views. After the war, he was arrested for allegedly collaborating with the Vichy regime (while Gabriële joined the Resistance), though he was cleared on lack of evidence. When I raise the matter, both Berests shake their heads. 'No, no, Picabia was not a fascist,' Claire says. 'He was not an anti-Semite. The truth is, he didn't care about the war. He wanted women, cars, pleasure. He was like a kid – but also a coward.' I mention that critic Jason Farago has described Picabia's wartime paintings – naked women with Aryan muscle men – as 'Nazi porn'. Anne, immediately exasperated, abandons her excellent English for a withering rebuttal in French: 'Le critique se trompe! (That critic is wrong!),' she says. 'The Nazis would have considered his art degenerate. They would have burnt it. So that is an enormous misreading. Clearly, that critic is very muddled.' Gabriële is a pleasure to read, the Belle Époque brought back to life in all its splendour. But how did the writing process work? 'We would each write a chapter and then swap, and rewrite each other's,' says Claire. 'We would rewrite so much that by the end we had no idea who had written what.' And did they squabble? 'Of course! There were many fights, many tears. But at the end of the day your sister is the only person who is allowed to tell you what you've written is s---,' Anne shrugs, and they both laugh. Once the book was finished, the Berests worried how it would be received by one reader in particular: their mother. 'She never spoke about Gabriële,' says Anne, in large part because Gabriële's son, their grandfather Vicente, had died by suicide aged 27, having been neglected by parents who 'loved themselves too much', and their four children not enough. 'He hanged himself right under his mother's bedroom window. He wanted her to find him dead, it's terrible,' says Claire. 'So we just knew Gabriële as our mean great-grandmother who made our mother's father suffer.' The sisters worried that even the act of writing Gabriële would be seen as a treacherous act. As they write in the book, 'Maybe it took two of us to shoulder the betrayal.' Eight years have passed since Gabriële was first published in French; has their mother now read it? 'Yes,' says Claire, although 'at first she only pretended she had. She said, 'It's perfect!' and we knew she hadn't, so we said, 'Tell us one thing that happens in it?' And she couldn't!' Claire chuckles. 'She was scared to read it,' adds Anne. 'But once she did, she was proud. The truth is, to create real art, you have to betray. You have to open doors, and look where you were told not to. As long as your purpose is good, everything is OK.'
