Art

art, painting, and digital media

art, painting, and digital media

art, painting, and digital media

Jacob Epstein

January 2, 2018 by Roy Johnson

controversial Anglo-American modernist sculptor

Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) was a sculptor who became a controversial pioneer in the world of modernist British art. He was born in New York’s Lower East Side to Jewish immigrant parents who had escaped anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland. When the family moved to a more respectable neighbourhood, he chose to remain amongst the ‘Russian, Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Chinese’ who clustered in what was then a very unfashionable part of the city.

Rock Drill

In 1902 he travelled to France, enrolling at the Ecole de Beaux Arts and visiting Rodin’s studio. He was a fan of his fellow countryman Walt Whitman, and there is a distinct element of homo-eroticism in his early works that parallels the celebration of the human body (largely Male) that features in Whitman’s poems. This is an element of his vision that became important in later works and his battles with censorship and even the mutilation of his statues and carvings.

In 1905 he transferred to London and quickly made contact with people such as George Bernard Shaw and Augustus John. Even more surprisingly he secured a large public commission at the age of only twenty-seven. This was for a series of decorative statues for the new headquarters of the British Medical Association in the Strand.

The nude figures he produced depicting maternity and Hygieia (goddess of health and cleanliness) became the target of outraged prudish hostility, and a press campaign was mounted by the Evening Standard. The project was completed, but it was twenty years before he received another architectural commission.

He was supported and befriended by Eric Gill, who had similar ambitions to bring primitive elemental forms into public art. They planned to build a private temple in Sussex where they could express their enthusiasm for nudity and sexuality without hindrance. The project was never completed, but the celebration of human physicality pervaded almost everything they went on to produce.

Epstein’s next major work was the now-famous tomb of Oscar Wilde in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. This was admired by the young fellow-immigrant artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, but the French authorities protested against the winged figure’s nakedness and ordered its genitals to be obliterated. They were later hacked off by protesters more than once.

Meanwhile his domestic life was no less controversial. He was married to Margaret Dunlop but at the same time he had a number of lovers who his wife not only tolerated but allowed to live in the family home, along with the children who were conceived by them as a result.

Epstein isolated himself in a Sussex coastal village and produced a number of excellent abstracted figures of pregnant females and copulating doves, clearly influenced by the work of Constantin Brancusi who he had met in Paris. It has to be said that the works of Epstein, Brancusi, and Gaudier-Brzeska became almost indistinguishable around this period.

Just before the outbreak of war, in 1913 Epstein produced the first drawings for what was to become his most important work – Rock Drill. In its first version the dramatically modelled figure of a quarry worker was mounted astride a tripod, handling a real drilling machine.

Nothing could have better symbolised the Vorticist movement which championed his work in the second (and final) edition of its magazine BLAST. But Epstein refused to join the group founded by his supporter Wyndham Lewis. In fact Epstein was so appalled by the mechanised slaughter of young soldiers in the conflict of 1914-1918 that he removed the drill and tripod from the original sculpture.

This turned out to produce a much more aesthetically pleasing result – the futuristic head and torso which seemed to symbolise the machine age. Yet following this success his activity more or less split into two parts. The first was producing traditional bronze portrait busts for celebrities in a style that could have come from any time in the previous two-hundred years. The second was his far more interesting series of monumental carvings and sculptures that expressed something of the modern age. The first part provided him with an income; the second with continued notoriety.

Femaile Figure

It is amazing to recall the virulent hostility (and anti-Semitism) that his work aroused. Even the Royal Academy participated in the mutilation of his public commissions. Following the exhibition of his controversial Adam (1938) the statue was sold off for next to nothing and later displayed in a Blackpool funfair. Visitors were charged a shilling entry to view its enlarged genitals as a form of pornographic amusement. The same fate befell his next major work, Jacob and the Angel (1941) – though this has since been rescued and is now in the relative safety of the Tate Gallery.

He participated in the Festival of Britain 1951) but by this time he was being outflanked by younger contemporaries such as Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Lynn Chadwick. He completed further commissions for religious figures, notably on the re-built Coventry Cathedral, but his final secular work was the magnificent war memorial that stands in front of TUC headquarters at Congress House in London.

He was knighted in 1954, but his later years were marked by personal loss. His son died of a heart attack in 1954, and his daughter committed suicide later the same year. Epstein himself died in 1959 at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington – next door but one to the birthplace of Virginia Woolf.

Jacob Epstein biography – But the book at Amazon UK

Jacob Epstein biography – Buy the book at Amazon US

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Leonora Carrington

October 8, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a surrealist painter and writer whose life spanned two centuries and two continents. She was born in Chorley, Lancashire to wealthy parents in textile manufacturing.
Educated by private tutors and nuns, she was a rebellious and disobedient child who was expelled from more than one school. Her father disapproved of her interest in art, but her mother encouraged her cultural ambitions.

As the daughter of an upper-class family she was expected to be a debutante, and was actually presented formally at the court of King George V. But when she continued to rebel, she was sent to study art in Florence, where she was impressed by medieval painting and architecture. On return to London she was enrolled at the Chelsea School of Art and then at the academy run by expatriate cubist painter Amedee Ozenfant.

The year 1936 was something of an annus mirabilis for the nineteen year old student. She attended the International Exhibition of Surrealism at the New Burlington Galleries, and she read Herbert Read’s influential book Surrealism. She was attracted to the blend of realism and fantasy that the new artistic movement promoted. It also allowed her to blend the human with the animal world which is one of the striking features of her work.

Shortly afterwards she met Max Ernst, the German-born leader of both the Dadaism and Surrealism movements. He was forty-seven and married, she was twenty and single. They fell in love immediately, and the following year he dissolved his marriage and took her to Paris. He introduced her to other surrealist artists such as Joan Miro and Andre Breton. Their shared interests were reflected by the presence of birds and animals in their work.

Self-portrait 1936

Following this they moved to a small town in the Ardeche region of southern France, where they supported each other in painting and sculpture. She also experimented with automatic writing, which at that time was an integral part of surrealism. It was thought possible to tap into the unconscious mind by removing the critical, censoring element from the process of composition.

However, tragedy struck their idyll with the outbreak of war. Ernst was arrested by the French government for being a ‘hostile alien’. He was later released following the intercession of friends. But when the Germans occupied France, he was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo who had him on their list of ‘degenerate artists’. He managed to escape to America with the help of Varian Fry and Peggy Guggenheim, whom he later married.

Leonora was devastated by the separation. She was forced to sell everything in France and escaped to Spain, where she suffered from paralysing anxiety attacks and delusional episodes. She was eventually hospitalised and subjected to the barbaric ‘convulsive therapy’ and anti-psychotic drug treatment that was thought necessary at that time for people with mental disorders. She was traumatised by this experience, and eventually sought refuge in the Mexican embassy in Lisbon. The whole of this ghastly period is recorded in her memoir Down Below.

She made the experience of all this distress the source of inspiration for many of her works – both in fiction and graphic art. This was not unlike her contemporary the artist Frieda Kahlo. In 1941 she married the Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc whom she had met at the embassy. Like many marriages contracted around that time, it was one of convenience, enabling them to escape Europe. They went to New York, travelled down to Mexico, and divorced two years later. She remained in Mexico City for the rest of her life.

Her life was one of domestic seclusion – although she did become something of a cultural celebrity in the capital city. She met the Franco-Russian writer Victor Serge who was also living there in exile at the time. Later she married the Hungarian photographer Emeric Weisz with whom she had two sons, Pablo and Gabriel.

In the 1940s and 1950s her work became an interesting blend of her own fantasy and surrealism, Mexican folk lore and myth, and a growing sense of what we would now call ‘women’s liberation’. She wanted to explore the relationship of women’s bodies and sexuality with their psychological experiences of erotic life, of motherhood, and of domesticity.

She was completely unknown in Europe at that time, and remained so until she was ‘discovered’ in the early twenty-first century. But she exhibited in Mexico and had a certain following in New York. She had a close relationship with the Spanish surrealist painter Remedios Varo, who also lived in Mexican exile in the same neighbourhood. They even wrote collaboratively and attended meetings held by the Russian occultists Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.

In the 1960s she collaborated with other members of the Latin-American avant-garde such as the writer Octavio Paz and the film maker Luis Bunuel. She was also honoured with a major retrospective at the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. During the latter decades of her life she turned increasingly to three-dimensional works, producing bronze sculptures of humans and animals, as well as figures that combined both. She died in Mexico City in 2011 at the age of ninety-four. Her house in the Roma district has since been turned into a museum.

The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington – biography – Amazon UK
The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington – biography – Amazon US

Down Below – Memoir – Amazon UK
Down Below – Memoir – Amazon US

The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington – Amazon UK
The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington – Amazon US

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Mark Gertler biography

September 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the only working-class Bloomsbury artist

Mark Gertler (1896—1939) was born in Spitalfields in London’s East End, the youngest son of Jewish immigrant parents. When he was a year old, the family was forced by extreme poverty back to their native Galicia (Poland). His father travelled to America in search of work, but when this plan failed the family returned to London in 1896. As a boy he showed a marked talent for drawing, and on leaving school in 1906 he enrolled in art classes at Regent Street Polytechnic, which was the first institution in the UK to provide post-school education for working people.

Once again, because of his family’s poverty, he was forced to drop out after only a year and take up work as an apprentice in a stained glass company. However, he continued with his interest in art, and after gaining third place in a competition he submitted his drawings to the Slade and was granted a scholarship by Sir William Rothenstein.

His contemporaries during four years at the Slade included David Bomberg, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Christopher Nevinson and Stanley Spencer. More fatefully for his private life, he also met and fell in love with Dora Carrington. They had a turbulent and anguished relationship which lasted a number of years.

Meanwhile, he won prizes and scholarships, then left the Slade in 1912 to paint full time. He was patronised by Lady Ottoline Morrell who introduced him to Walter Sickert, Augustus John, and the Bloomsbury Group. He became moderately successful as a society portrait painter, but suffered in such company because of his relative poverty, his working-class origins, and his Jewishness.

In 1914 he was also taken up by Edward Marsh an art collector who was later to become secretary to Winston Churchill. Even this relationship became difficult, since Gertler was a pacifist, and he disapproved of the system of patronage. He broke off the relationship, and around this time painted what has become his most famous painting – The Merry-Go-Round.

In 1915 he became the love object of Lytton Strachey, but he continued his own pursuit of Dora Carrington for five years before she finally agreed to have a sexual relationship with him. For a time, he shared her with Strachey, with whom Carrington had meanwhile fallen in love. When she eventually left him to set up home with Strachey, Gertler was crushed and mortified.

As a young man, he projected a personal magnetism which fascinated many of his contemporaries. He is the model for the sinister sculptor Loerke in D.H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love, the dashing Byronic hero of Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow, and the egotistical painter of Katherine Mansfield’s story Je ne parle pas Francais.

The first symptoms of tuberculosis appeared in 1920, and he was forced to enter a sanatorium. Nevertheless, despite his poor health, he continued to have yearly exhibitions at the Goupil Gallery in Regent Street.

In 1930 Gertler married Marjorie Hodgkinson, and they had a son in 1932. Their marriage was often difficult, and Gertler suffered from the same feelings of ill-ease that undermined relationships with his patrons. Edward Marsh continued to buy Gertler’s paintings, even though he admitted that he no longer liked or understood them. But in order to supplement his intermittent income from painting, Gertler was forced to become a part-time teacher at the Westminster School of Art .

Throughout the 1930s he had difficulty in selling his paintings, even though he had a few loyal supporters such as J.B. Priestly and Aldous Huxley. But depressed by what he saw as his own failure, his ill-health, and the fear of another imminent world war, he committed suicide in June 1939. He is buried in Willesden Jewish Cemetery.

This biography of Mark Gertler reappraises an extraordinary artist. Gertler was admired and encouraged by Walter Sickert, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Henry Moore. His magnificent and haunting pictures were keenly collected by London society and yet at 48, feeling alienated, he killed himself. Sarah MacDougall explores the life of this complex man, whose powerful images, like the “Merry-go-round” or the “Creation of Eve” have lost none of their disturbing eloquence.

Mark Gertler – But the book at Amazon UK

Mark Gertler – Buy the book at Amazon US

Sarah McDougall, Mark Gertler, London: John Murray, 2002, pp.413, ISBN: 0719557992

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

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Twentieth century literature

Milton Glaser: Art is Work

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

graphic design, interiors, objects and illustration

Don’t be put off by the cover design – this is a wonderful book. Milton Glaser is one of the most influential design and illustration gurus of the late 20th century in the USA. He was responsible for the “I love NY” logo and the poster of Bob Dylan with psychedelic hair which became a symbol of the 1980s. This is one of the few design books I have come across where the text is just as interesting as the graphics. Milton Glaser has thought a lot about the fundamentals of good design, and his ideas come through here via a series of interviews, plus his own commentary on the work illustrated.

And there’s a big bonus. He doesn’t just show his finished designs, but includes his preliminary drafts and early attempts which lead up to a successful outcome. So it’s like being invited to sit in his studio whilst he thinks and works out loud. He’s astonishingly versatile. The book contains examples of poster design, record covers, freehand drawings (amazingly similar to David Hockney in style) book illustrations, interior design, product design, typography, and publicity materials.

His observations focus on the aesthetics of creativity – and yet he keeps his eye on the commercial and professional aspects of his work. He’s frank enough to admit that if the client’s budget is not big enough, he is prepared to discriminate between a ‘one hour’ idea and a ‘six hour’ design.

He’s a great believer in the idea that designers must continue to draw to develop their ideas, and he believes in creation as a form of work and process:

When you’re thinking you do a sketch and it’s fuzzy. You have to keep it fuzzy so that the brain looks at it and imagines another iteration that is clearer. Then you do another sketch that advances it again. It may take a number of these intermediate solutions before you arrive.

It’s a very instructive experience to see his rough sketches develop as he stretches and changes an idea until he comes up with what looks a fresh and spontaneous picture. That’s what he means by his book title. These designs do not just happen spontaneously: they are the result of hard work

He is very aware of modern painters – Klee, Mondrian, the much under-rated Sonia Delauney, Klimt, and Max Ernst. There’s also a portrait of Duke Ellington which has elements of Francis Bacon in its colouring and handling of paint, and a series of posters for the Venice Biennale which combine images of the city’s emblematic lion with ink spattering reflecting his appreciation of the work of Jackson Pollock

I found his book illustrations less successful, his restaurant designs inspired in terms of lighting, and his product design superb. There’s a whole page of sketches for a cocktail glass, any one of which you would be pleased to hold. But the finished product – complete with double-sided conical bowl with a vacuum to keep your Martini cold, fluted stem, and Art Deco collar uniting the two – well, my knees went weak when I turned the page, and I would pay substantial money to own a set.

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Milton Glaser, Art is Work, London: Thames and Hudson, 2000, pp.272, ISBN 0500510288

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Modernism – a very short introduction

September 1, 2010 by Roy Johnson

radical developments in the arts 1900-1930

As a critical term ‘modernism’ needs careful use and understanding. For it refers not to things that are modern, but to the general movement of experiment in the arts that took place in the period 1900-1930. Modernism is the loose term we use for discussing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Christopher Butler offers as background reasons for these radical artistic developments the loss of religious belief, the growth of science and technology, the spread of mass culture, and radical changes in gender roles and relationships.

He starts his survey of the period very wisely by presenting and analysing three iconic modernist works – James Joyce’s Ulysses, Fernand Leger’s La Ville, and Berthold Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, explaining how they ‘work’ in terms of their use of new techniques including fragmentation, collage, strange juxtapositions, abstraction, parody, allusions, and referentiality.

Then he looks at the theories that were advanced as attempts to underpin these developments. This is a tricky area, because what artists say or claim about their own work is not necessarily to be taken at face value. There are other problems too. Picasso and Braque for instance invented cubism without writing a single word explaining the process.. Many other artists on the other hand wrote manifestos full of complex notions and theories that turn out to be entirely unconnected with the works of art they produced.

Schoenberg thought his twelve tone system would assure the dominance of world music by Germany for the next one hundred years [sounds familiar?] but within a short time most listeners had tired of atonality. Writers such as Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot fared better in explaining their methods because literature is a medium which must faux de mieux be articulated via language.

The range of Butler’s references and examples discussed is enormous – though I was not persuaded by his attempts to recruit Wallace Stephens and William Faulkner into the Pantheon of Significance. It’s surprising how quickly some artistic reputations fade or in some cases are revealed as completely bogus – Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Herman Broch, Andre Gide, and Gertrude Stein spring to mind as candidates.

He devotes an entire chapter to the creation of a subjective point of view and its counterpart in modern fiction, the Epiphany. Literature naturally dominates here, but he compensates for this by including a section on surrealism, in which painting is the main art form. Interestingly enough, even though it was a short-lived phenomenon, it still lives on in occasional appearances in the visual arts, whereas in literary forms it is as dead as the dodo.

He brings all his arguments together with a quite refreshing examination of modernism and politics. This starts with the surrealists who half-heartedly tried to ally themselves to the Communist Party, then passes on to show how the communist orthodoxy of Socialist Realism chimed exactly with the Nazi policy on the arts. He also includes a lively critique of Berthold Brecht, who often escapes censure for his Stalinist propaganda, disguised as it often is beneath historical allegory.

He concludes with arguments that are quite contemporary in their scepticism. No matter which critical approach we take for instance, it is simply not possible to say which parts of Women in Love, The Firebird, or Guernica are ‘progressive’ or contribute to social development or enrichment. But what is more interesting is that these great modernist works still speak to us as vibrant examples of artistic achievement long after the historical and political events that provide their context have passed.

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Christopher Butler, Modernism: a very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp.117, ISBN: 0192804413

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Natalia Goncharova

June 24, 2011 by Roy Johnson

paintings, theatre costumes, graphic design, and fabrics

Natalia Goncharova was one of the many talented artists to emerge from the Silver Age of Russia’s cultural development in the first two decades of the twentieth century. She went on to become a major figure in the Russian contribution to modernism that centred on Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes in the period 1913-1918, and in fact she continued to produce art works in a number of genres up to her death in 1962. She emerges from the tradition of Russian realism in the late nineteenth century, and her early paintings are almost indistinguishable from the prevailing orthodoxy set by painters such as Surov, Repin, and Surikov. She was from the upper-class nobility: her great-aunt was Natalia Pushkina, wife of the poet Alexander Pushkin.

From 1910 onwards she began to paint in the style that became known as Russian primitivism. These are paintings that combine fauvist colouring with faux naive drawing in scenes that seek to capture elemental visions of Russian life, populated by peasants, soldiers, dogs, in village settings. Yet she experimented with cubism, Rayonism, and Russian primitivism at the same time as also producing icon-like religious tableaux.

In 1911 she became associated with the Der Blaue Reiter group. Together with her husband and fellow artist Mikhail Larionov she developed the Rayonist style of painting, which was like a fusion of cubism and futurism, not dissimilar to some paintings of the Italian Boccioni and those of her fellow Russian modernist Malevich.

Strangely enough, all the styles for which she became known in her mature period appear ready-configured for development in her early works: fauvist-style landscapes, medieval Russian dress designs, beautiful still lifes and cubist abstractions. She worked in a variety of media and genres – easel painting, book illustration, stage and costume design, portraiture, interior design (wallpapers and fabrics) and icon painting.

video presentation of work by Natalia Goncharova

In 1915 she was commissioned by Diaghilev to design the sets for the ballet Liturgy, with choreography by Leonide Massine and music by Igor Stravinsky. She was one of those Russian modernists (like Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Rodchenko) who profited from contact with western European art, and like them she wisely emigrated, going to live in Paris in 1921 whilst it was still possible to do so, thereby escaping the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and beyond. In 1939 she became a French citizen and lived on in Paris until her death.

This lavishly illustrated and definitive study of her life and work is a masterful piece of work by Anthony Parton, specialist in the Russian avant garde. It is the largest collection of her paintings and period photographs in a single printed volume, and contains a full scholarly apparatus of bibliography, list of exhibitions and stage works, and notes to the text. The publishers have done him proud with the quality of the full colour illustrations, and he has returned the compliment with a stunning monograph which I am quite sure will remain the definitive study for some time to come.

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Anthony Parton, Goncharova: The Art and Design of Natalia Goncharova, Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 2010, pp.519, ISBN: 185149605X

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New Media in Late 20th-century Art

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

new forms of multimedia, performance, and digital art

There’s nothing like discussing ‘contemporary’ art forms for making you realise we’re now in the twenty-first century. When you look at developments which seem quite recent (particularly related to the Internet) you suddenly realise that these were in the LAST CENTURY!! – (to sound for a moment a little like Tom Wolfe). The latter half of the nineteen hundreds saw artists breaking up the boundaries of aesthetic genres and introducing all sorts of new technology into their work – as well as mixing disparate activities into one experience. New Media in Late 20th-century Art is a survey of the new media which evolved roughly in the period 1950—2000.

It covers the mixing of media and performance, video art, video installations, and the new forms of digital art. Starting from the notion that traditional Art has been a painting in two dimensions, Michael Rush looks at the extensions made by the twentieth century. It’s a beautifully illustrated book, with picture captions which explain the significance of each medium.

After an introductory consideration of the inclusion of Time, which is made possible by film, he passes into the early stages of media and performance. This covers the multimedia happenings which started with events organised by the painter Robert Rauschenberg, the composer John Cage, and the choreographer Merce Cunningham organised in the 1960s. These mixed together various combinations of film, acting, music, and dance, and there began the widespread use of video film around the same time.

Performances range from video films of ultra-minimalist events such as hand gestures or people asleep, to live broadcasts of people commenting whilst under local anaesthetic on their own cosmetic surgery operations. Yes, it’s true.

There’s a lot of combining performance art with video recordings of it. Artists put themselves into embarrassing and even dangerous situations and record the consequences as a work of ‘art’. The problem for a lot of the art works created between the 1960s an 1980s is that there is little easily recoverable record of them. On the plus side, there are lots and lots of artists represented here – and their work is illustrated in colour with stills from exhibitions and ‘installations’.

The general problem with the survey is that most of its emphasis is on the content of the so-called art works, rather than the art itself. There is nothing new in an artist putting her adolescent traumas of sexual identity into a work of art just because it’s in the form of a video film.

The older artist to whom most repeated reference is made in the context of cross-boundary works is Marcel Duchamp, and the contemporary names which come up most frequently are Naim June Paik and Bill Viola, both installation artists. Most of these works seem to add up to multiple projections, using TV monitors or giant split screens

Bill Viola – ‘Acceptance’ 2008

A section on digital art attempts to bring things up to date with digitally altered photography and virtual reality programs. But in fact it’s very difficult to keep up with the developments of digital multimedia. I think the publishers will do Michael Rush a favour by publishing a second edition which allows him to add material on the Flash and Shockwave movies which are now sweeping the Web.

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Michael Rush, New Media in Late 20th-Century Art, London: Thames and Hudson, revised edition 2005, pp.248, ISBN: 0500203784

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Nina Hamnett biography

November 30, 2010 by Roy Johnson

artist, modernist, and the Queen of Bohemia

Nina Hamnett (1890-1956) was born in Tenby, south-west Wales. She endured a largely unhappy childhood, but her skill at drawing enabled her to escape her miserable life at home (rather like her near-contemporary Dora Carrington). She studied at the Pelham Art School and the London School of Art between 1906 and 1910.

In 1911 she launched herself into the London art world on the strength of a fifty pound advance on an inheritance from her uncle and a stipend of two shillings and sixpence a week from her aunts. There she socialised in the Cafe Royal with the likes of Augustus John, Walter Sickert, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. She became very popular as a result of her high spirits, her devil-may-care attitude, and her sexual promiscuity. Like other women at the time revelling in a newfound independence, she had her hair cut short in a ‘crophead’ style (what we would now call a basin cut) and she wore eccentric clothing:

I wore in the daytime a clergyman’s hat, a check coat, and a skirt with red facings … white stockings and men’s dancing pumps and was stared at in the Tottenham Court Road. One had to do something to celebrate one’s freedom and escape from home,

It was said that at this phase in her life Nina Hamnett had the knack of being in the right place at the right time. In 1914 she went to live in Montparnasse, Paris, immediately meeting on her first night there the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani. He introduced her to Picasso, Serge Dighilev, and Jean Cocteau, and she went to live at the famous artist’s residence of La Ruche which housed many other Bohemian artists and modernist writers. It was there that she met the Norwegian artist Roald Kristian, who became her first husband.

She rapidly established herself as a flamboyant and unconventional figure. She was bisexual, drank heavily, and had liaisons with many other artists in Bohemian society, often modelling for them as a way of earning a (precarious) living. She established her reputation as ‘The Queen of Bohemia’ by such antics as dancing nude on a cafe table amongst her drinking friends.

Her reputation as a Bohemian and an artist eventually filtered back to London, where she returned to join Roger Fry and his circle working on the application of modernist design principles to fabrics, furniture, clothes, and household objects as part of the Omega Workshops. She acted as a model for the clothes along with Mary Hutchinson, Clive Bell‘s mistress, and she mingled with other members of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

Nina Hamnett (left) and Winifred Gill (right) in Omega dresses

Her paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Salon d’Automne in Paris. She also taught at the Westminster Technical Institute in London. Around this time she divorced her first husband and lived with the composer and fellow alcoholic E.J. Moeran. They were part of a circle that included the composer Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine) who who established a very bohemian circle in Eynsford in Kent, along with other composers such as Constant Lambert and William Walton.

During the 1920s (and for the rest of her life) she made the area in central London known as Fitzrovia her home and stamping ground. This new locale for arty-Bohemia was centred on the Fitzroy Tavern in Charlotte Street which she frequented along with fellow Welsh artists Augustus John and Dylan Thomas, making occasional excursions across Oxford Street to the Gargoyle Club in Soho.

After this glittering debut into the glamorous world of modernism and the artistic avant-garde, the remainder of her life was a no less spectacular descent into poverty, squalor, and alcoholism. She lived in a sleazy bed-sit in Howland Street, which was infested with lice and littered with rat-droppings. The flat was furnished only with a broken-down chair, a piece of string for a clothes line, and newspapers instead of proper bedding.

Dolores Courtney by Nina Hamnett

In 1932 she published a volume of memoirs entitled Laughing Torso, which was a best-seller in both the UK and the USA. Following its publication she was sued by Aleister Crowley, whom she had accused of practising black magic. The ensuing trial caused a sensation which helped sales of the book, and Crowley lost his case.

Her success in this instance only fuelled her downward spiral, and she spent the last three decades of her life propping up the bar of the Fitzroy trading anecdotes of her glory years for free drinks. She took little interest in personal hygiene, was incontinent in public, and vomited into her handbag.

Her ending was as spectacular as had been her previous life. Drunk one night she either fell or jumped from the window of her flat and was impaled on the railing spikes below. She lingered miserably in hospital for three more days, where her last words were “Why don’t they let me die?”