Tracey Emin REVIEW

Tracey Emin

"Love is what you want"

Hayward Gallery 18th May - 29th August

All works copyright Tracey Emin. All photos David Levene

The Hayward Gallery in London's South Bank is one of the most prestigious addresses for contemporary art in the world so to give the space to an artist such as Tracey Emin is logical from a contemporary or publicity point of view but it  could be a risk when it comes to content.

This is the artist who Robert Hughes singled out as  "stale" when he slammed the "bratty cynicism and quick-fix sensationalism" of the Young British Artists at an RA dinner in 2004.

"An artist who you know more about the person than you do her work".

"A woman who the media has been so obsessed with that it is hard to believe we don't already know everything about her".

The Gallery and it's brutal architecture is loved and hated in equal measure so having an artist who garners the same feelings may not be such a risk after all, more a meeting of kindred spirits.

May 18, 2011 sees the opening of the  first retrospective display of the former enfant terrible of Britart.

Photo Alexander Newton

Renowned for her controversial and often explicit work, she has spent a large part of her artistic career defending herself and often doing it inebriated. Oft derided as being a personality rather than an artist, some say she is the art and at times it has been difficult to disagree.

Her art appears (note) to be nothing more than an outpouring of Tracey Emin and her life. Her perceived public persona is that of a celebrity whose life is the guide and her art a bonus thanks to the White Cube and Charles Saatchi.

Her focus on her drinking, rape, abortions and love life interspersed with her musings on family (she called her grandmother plum and she in turn was pudding) show a fractured individual who surely should be on a psychiatrists couch not in an art gallery?

But can she prove us wrong?

The Exhibition                                  Photo David Levene

With a wonderfully effusive flourish from the ticket man I was ushered into the exhibition. You walk into the grand room and Emins trademark appliquéd blankets hang two deep whilst watched over by "Knowing My Enemy", a wooden, collapsing pier structure with a hut on the end that is surely there just because it reminds her of her home and not totally as a safe place her father wanted to "hear the waves in". I immediately like the honesty of this. I'll share with you but this is for my father and I can do that.

 David Levene

The blankets are reminiscent to me of the miners strike placards, facts and fiction all rolled into a hand made but heartfelt plea to be read.

But I saw no one just pass by. People were transfixed.

 "Fuck school why go somewhere every day to be told you’re late"

 "Psyco Slut"

"Harder and Better Than All of You Fucking Bastards"

The more you read the more you need to read.....it is like an addiction.

The start of this exhibition does exactly what it needs to do, takes you into the rarefied thought processes and confused background that is Tracey Emin.

The infamous misspelt words and bad grammar. The reminiscing of family mixed with outbursts of obscenities and anger, outrage and sexual content are mesmerizing. You may be offended at times but you will still read every word.

It is almost as if Emin wants to introduce herself to you, not as a person but as a context. Here are some thoughts, you want them to be mine, go ahead, but they are thoughts to encourage you to think and seek more. Emin is unapologetic for her life and thank god for that.

Emin states that her appliquéd blankets are like paintings. "When you're doing an oil painting, you put the paint on and scrape it off. Doing a blanket is similar to that. You can put loads of patches down and think that's it and then you suddenly change your mind and change them all over again."

Moving from here you are taken into the dark corridor of neon.

Photo David Levene

Emin speaks to you through Neon, or rather shouts at you. This is where you see the poet or at least a softer side. But can you call it art?

Looking for all intent and purpose like a seedy sex street or at best a tawdry seaside resort, the words vie with each other to shock you or give reflection.

From the exhibitions title "Love is what you want" to  "Meet me in Heaven, I will wait for you"  you feel  for Emin and then she gives her poetic  persona "You Forgot to Kiss My Soul ", or is that a sexual innuendo, and then ruins it with the overtly media savvy  "My cunt is wet with fear" and you remember how she started the press courting.

At the opening, Emin said that there were things she wouldn't do now. Growing up is not always a bad thing.

The films which are in room 2 are truthfully self indulgent but now that we have this gathering of her work we can find the thread that at least allows us to try to see why they are here.

"Love is a strange thing" has Emin being propositioned on a bridge by a dog and the dog is affronted by her prejudice when she turns him down.

"Riding for a Fall" has Emin riding a horse on a beach in Margate and she states "That's the prodigal daughter riding home you see".

And then you see " Why I Never Became a Dancer"  a film that describes how teenage sexual abuse left her with a sense of worthlessness which she controlled by utilising this as a power to attract men.

Here is where there is some justification to Emins film work and the stylish linking of her work in the exhibition. There is a graceful yet subconscious thread that permeates throughout.

From the blankets and their personal messages of angst, loss and chaos and then, in the neon, you see the tenderness and self loathing, then the re-visiting of despondency in the film.

In truth, the films are Art school at best and that is probably being kind.

What is positive is that in the first three rooms you visit you see that Tracey Emin will not be pigeonholed as you want her to be.

Some critics will say it is a sign that it is all an elaborate hoax, no real substance.

I would argue that it is a sign of what Emin is. Multi faceted and like the rest of us, better at some things than others.

Alongside these films we go to early work and family and friends.

Photo david Levene

There is a cornucopia of art to see here.

Writing, letters, sculpture, appliqué to name but a few.

But there is warmth and her own (shared) version of love in here.

The video of Emin and her father on a beach ends with Emin saying "I love you Daddy" which is both disturbing yet beautiful.

We are then taken through a recreation of her 2003 exhibition Menphis

After reading about Memphis,  the ancient capital of Egypt, Emin visited it to find it was a rubbish dump. Finding  it to be a metaphor for things in her own life, of things that had been and gone, she created her exhibition using memorabilia.

We are then transported into the mainstay of Emins work and reputation, "Trauma" and "Paintings.

There is a symmetry here also as the detritus and sadness of abortions and life are shared for all to see. Nothing is spared for the voyeur,  hospital nametags, pill bottles, pills,  letters of desperation and sadness, used Tampons. They are all here.

Tate Modern now has a collection of Emins works including the wonderful and heartfelt "May Dodge, my Nan" but last years "Voyeur" exhibition could have been made for Emin.

The  drawings and paintings are reminders of depression and  sexual misery and then amongst it all we see  "Those who suffer love", the 2009 animation comprising of around 200 drawings and showing a woman masturbating.

Provocative? manipulative? Media friendly?

Yes.

But the drawings that make up this animation are excellent.

It is a controversial section and in many ways disappointing. Emin has grown up and these exhibits span 16 years and you wonder if in retrospect she would have been so forthright.

But I like to think that what we see is a person who is growing into her art and her self.

The drawings are another enigma.

Tracey Emin can draw.

Beautifully.

There is a rawness about her drawings and a respect for the art involved. Many are monoprints, so there is an originality that goes against the perception of Emin, she can't control the final image, there is always that element of doubt in what will appear.

Then there is the content.

So many of Emins drawings are of female genitalia, usually her own.

This just gives ammunition to those that want to belittle Emin but look beyond it. You don't have to come to the Hayward. You can go somewhere else.

Her paintings and sculpture lean us towards abstract and the inner feelings of Emin.

It is almost as if she feels she has given too much and needs to become a little hidden from view.

Like most of her work, there are gems to be found. "Black Cat" 2008 has a darkness to it that only a true artist could paint. It is more than the superfluous "angst driven" Emin that we are told she portrays. It has a depth that upon re-examination you see an entirely different painting before you each time.

photo: Todd White art photography courtesy Jay Jopling / White Cube

So the question is to be answered.

Is Tracey Emin more than a media creation that the Hayward Gallery Publicity department are using for promotion?

I entered this exhibition expecting to be disappointed.

Not with Tracey Emin but with her art.

This retrospective has done her a huge favour. By seeing so much of her work in one place, and with so many mixed media you can follow her life and her thoughts and her art......as far as she wants you to.

My opinion, for what it is worth is that Tracey Emin is not showing us her innermost thoughts and fears.

Tracey Emin is a perspective artist to me....she gives you what you believe is her life because it is BASED on her life and she lets you decide what it means.

We all look at things differently, Emin just lets you think you know more to start off with than you really do.

I don't think she shares half as much as we like to think she does.

Is this to play with us or confuse us? I don't know, isn't that the point?

Her muse is her life. Why not, it is what we all know the most about. And as Tracey Emin grows older then the way she looks at life is changing too.

This is contemporary art, she uses her closest emotions as her blank canvas.

This isn't new.

Remember another great female artist Frida Kahlo?

A critic once wrote  "It is impossible to separate the life and work of this extraordinary person. Her paintings are her biography."

Tracey Emin is also biographical but always holds something back.

She is a media personality and will be continuously attacked but she hides from nothing in her creations.

Some work and some don't and how we interpret it is up to us.....and for that I salute her

Tracey Emin once said (inebriated) during a Channel 4 debate about the Turner Prize in 1997 that "no real people will be watching".

Well they are watching now Tracey....and you deserve them to be.

Eadweard Muybridge at Tate Britain

 Eadweard Muybridge at Tate Britain - 8 September - 16 January 2011

Horses can fly

Every so often you hear about an exhibition and you get genuinely excited.

It can be a friend, a local gallery, someone you grew up learning about or admiring and then sometimes....you find yourself in a place where you know you will go to an exhibition wherever it is.

Ladies and gentlemen, here is one such exhibition, Eadweard Muybridge at Tate Britain!

Here we have a man who was an artist, scientist, editor, murderer and old fashioned eccentric. So where to begin.

Edward James Muggeridge was born on the 9th April 1830 in Kingston Upon Thames in England.

His early years were in the book trade where he learnt the value of promotion. These teachings were to be utilised in later years to promote his work and are in many ways the template for modern self promoting artists around the world. Always available for a newspaper interview, his critics suggest that this is the basis of his success but that would be an injustice.

By the 1860's, he had emigrated to America and had called himself Helios (which he continued predominantly until 1872) where he was one of San Francisco's most important landscape photographers.

He gave himself this moniker claiming that he had an affinity with the god of the sun. He also had his own logo (a winged camera with glowing orbs) just to assist the promotion.

His reputation was complete with photos of Yosemite and San Francisco, where he had an ability to show the grandeur and expansiveness of the West. 

During this time he invented his 'sky shade', a rudimentary shutter that allowed mechanical control over the time the film was exposed to light allowing greater control for landscape photographers.

His fame brought him to the attention of Leland Stanford, former governor of California, who hired Muybridge to get a picture that would settle a hotly debated issue (not a bet as is often quoted): Is there a moment in a horse’s gait when all four hooves are off the ground at once?

In 1872 Muybridge took up the challenge. But he continued with other works including the 'mammoth plates' of Yosemite and the aftermath of the conflict of the Modoc tribe.

In1874, Muybridge's wife gave birth to a boy who they christened Floredo Helios Muybridge. In the same year, Muybridge discovered that his wife had a lover, a Major Harry Larkyns.

On October 17, 1874, he sought out Larkyns; said, "Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here is the answer to the letter you sent my wife"; and shot and killed him. He was put on trial for the killing, but acquitted of the killing on the grounds that it was "justifiable homicide." The all male jury appeared to understand that a man could only be pushed so far before retaliation became acceptable.

After the trial Muybridge left the U.S. for a time and photographed in Panama and Guatemala where he was sponsored by the Pacific Mail Train Company, further proof of the acceptance of his crime.

In 1877 he returned to America and to Leland Stanford. 

In 1878, using a series of fifty cameras he proved that the hooves all leave the ground, although not at the point of full extension forward and back, as contemporary illustrators tended to imagine, but rather at the moment when all the hooves are tucked under the horse.

Each of the cameras were arranged along a track parallel to the horse's, and each of the camera shutters were controlled by trip wires which were triggered by the horse's hooves. This series of photos, is called The Horse in Motion and is arguably the most famous of Muybridges' images.

Muybridge used the wet plate process in this work and truth be told the results were hardly more than silhouettes, but they showed what had never before been seen by the unaided eye.

Publication of these photographs made Muybridge an international celebrity although there is a belief that Muybridge on many occasions re-touched these images.

Scientific American, among other publications, ran articles acknowledging Muybridge’s accomplishment. However, when Leland Stanford asked his close friend and horseman Dr. J. B. D. Stillman to publish an analysis of the horse in motion, Stillman used Muybridge’s photography to illustrate the book without crediting the photographer.

Hoping to capitalize upon the considerable public attention those pictures drew, Muybridge invented the Zoopraxiscope in 1880, a machine similar to the Zoetrope, but that projected the images so the public could see realistic motion. The system was, in many ways, a precursor to the development of the motion picture.

If any of you have seen 'The Matrix' then see this exhibition and you will understand the impact of Muybridge with his stop-motion photography.

Muybridge used this technique many times to photograph people and animals to study their movement. From boxing, to walking down stairs, and even small children walking to their mother were sufficiently interesting to Muybridge to be the subject of his photographs. In any case, Muybridge's work stands near the beginning of the science of biomechanics and the mechanics of athletics.

Muybridge became a lecturer in later life and eventually returned to his native England in 1894 and died in 1904 in Kingston-on-the-Thames.

And so to the exhibition.

Congratulations must be given to Tate Britain.

This exhibition deserves simplicity and a lead and they give both. On entering you are drawn to the imagery and in many ways this is not an exhibition but an experiment.

Points of interest not to be missed in order to remember that he was an exceptional photographer before Stanford appeared include the San Francisco images.

Not just the space that is there, note that there are hardly any people in these images. It is almost a ghost town appearance instead of a 'new' town.

A man, a self publicist, a photographer, murderer and scientist, Muybridge deserves this exhibition and Tate Britain did not let him down.

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http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/eadweardmuybridge/default.shtm

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Beatrice Darmagnac at A.N.P.Q. Sep 2010

Beatrice Darmagnac

September 04 - October 16 2010

Driving to an exhibition opening at Galerie A.N.P.Q in Péret I am often struck with the kind of excitement that reminds me of going on an outing as a young boy... the anticipation of going somewhere you know you will have a good time and yet there is still that flicker of apprehension about what you’ll find when you arrive! This time as ever entering Gabby Campbell and Richard Johnson’s fantastically presented exhibition space I was not disappointed.

Currently on show is the work of Beatrice Darmagnac, an initially self taught artist who subsequently went on to study at the Academy of Arts and Ceramics, Tarbes in 2008.

Richard explains, "When we opened Beatrice drove up to see us unsolicited and arrived with some of her work. We made the decision then and there that we would exhibit her work ......and here we are!"

Working in a mixture of medium, including photography, sculpture and painting, Beatrice is a consistent addition to the quality and ilk of artist that A.N.P.Q is striving to promote and overwhelmingly achieves. Her work is the first that the writer has encountered here that moves away from the kind of creative comfort zones, i.e. a gallery wall on which artworks are hung, that many of us are used to. Rather, Beatrice creates artworks in response to the space.

"I am a sculptor. Of materials or of the moment. I play with effects to create visual surprises. I look to the poetry that lies in everything and nothing, how I feel intuitively about the world...”

From the sublime.....I was struck by the large canvas in the main gallery space created in situ across which huge, painterly black stag beetles crawl towards one another.... to well, the puzzling, I refer to artful scatterings of dust inside a gallery display case entitled ‘Comet’.

Wandering from piece to piece it was apparent that if it was Beatrice’s intention that the audience engage with her work then she was succeeding. Notably regards the almost Zen-like installation in the centre of the main gallery created out of salt titled, ‘That’s All Folks’, I heard comments from "lazy" to "I don't get it" to "It's inspirational!" in the space of a few minutes. I wondered if this particular piece was meant as a parting gesture.

The use of lighting in the show is powerful yet unobtrusive. Touches such as a soft strobe subtlety enhance the work, though most visitors may only be subconsciously aware of the effect. In this light, I enjoyed the artist’s photographic works in the adjacent room, fusions of black and white; urban, suburban; layer upon layers, which draw the eye in further and further. 

There is a passion and world weariness on display here; and just as you think you understand it, a strange naivety and beauty in the work attracts your attention, contradicting all initial thoughts.

Yet again, felicitations A.N.P.Q! Another exhibition well worth making the time to see. Meanwhile, as is becoming the norm, I think I’ll have one more for the road!

Gatsby

Photos: Gabby Campbell

Exposed at the TATE Modern Aug 2010

Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera  

Having experienced the indignity of a full-body scan at Albuquerque airport en route to London - where there was no opportunity to tell the security woman  scrutinising the images that the large hole in the back of my knickers did not reveal a penchant for kinky underwear, they’d got caught in the washing machine door and were my last unpacked pair – I entered the portals of the Tate Modern my vanity still slightly smouldering from the humiliation of being so intimately surveyed, yet willing to pay a £10 entrance fee to become a surveyor myself.  

It’s a good title ‘Exposed’, for we are all exposed to some degree, as artist or as audience. The 14 rooms of photographs and images may sit for the most part flat against the walls, inviting the gaze to come closer... and yes, a bit closer to have an even better look since we know we are allowed...however, the notion of the unseen photographer and his motives, his camera cleverly concealed in walking sticks or shoes, inflate them until we are no longer experiencing an image on a wall but a 3D scene that involves so much more than the final exposure.  Like the late 19^th century Italian photographer, Giuseppe Primoli who liked to take impromptu photos of the rich and famous (the Godfather perchance of the Paparazzi?) or more recently Philip-Lorca de Corcia’s ‘Heads’, photos of New Yorkers taken unaware and without consent using a complex system of hidden cameras. 

As I joined my fellow voyeurs moving intently from photo to photo I found myself reflecting more on the nature of the person behind the camera and of us visitors, who at some time in our lives have had to fight the urge to look where we know our eyes are not invited, to read what was not sent to us or participate in scenes like spectres where we do not wish to be revealed, than I did the images themselves.   And I wondered if we looked now at the subject matter, naked, intimate or dying, with the same breathless concentration as the artists who had pursued them in the name of art?

Voyeurism for gratification, from the French pioneers of early pornography like Auguste Belloc, who topped-up their incomes by producing stereo cards that could be watched in 3-D of women with their dresses hitched up to their waists, to images of women hidden behind leather-masks by the surrealist photographer Jacques-Andre Boiffard.   Voyeurism as social commentary, like the work of Cammie Toloui, who made the audience her subject while working as a stripper, or Lewis Hine’s stark images of children working in factories and mines commissioned by the Child Labour Committee.  

Or.... and I lingered here caught in a daze of fascination and horror in the dimly lit space dedicated to Kohei Yoshiyuki’s series of photographs entitled ‘The Park’.... voyeurism of the voyeur, in which the photographer, equipped with a small camera and infra red light, slips into the shadows to document the participants of a local night time ‘sport’ he has discovered which involves creeping as close as possible undetected to couples making love in the park and watching and touching them.  Yoshiyuki defends his participation as a means to gain the trust of the other voyeurs on the basis of his intention to make art as opposed to the sleazy pursuit of a free thrill, whilst conceding that the very act of taking photographs is a form of voyeurism, ‘I may be a voyeur, because I am a photographer.’[1] 

But what about the unknown photographer in the section titled ‘Witnessing Violence’, who happened to see a woman falling to her death from a burning building and had enough wits about him or her to overcome the shock of witnessing it to whisk out a camera and capture her decent? Her long, white nightdress lifted by the speed of the fall masking her upper body and face, but exposing her naked lower torso desperately treading air to break the fall;  the people who loved her left with this memento of her last moments, in which she will fall forever towards her violent death.  Is the image worth more than the dignity of the falling woman being safeguarded by the simple, selfless act of the photographer discarding it? Is there a higher purpose in our drive to own the moment of a single, tragic event?  But here we stand, unable to remove our eyes.

While some of us may smugly applaud a recent US court ruling that placed the artist’s right to self-expression over and above the individual’s right to privacy, paradoxically we suck air through clenched teeth when we hear about the 10,500 surveillance cameras in London that monitor us without our permission 24/7 picking our noses or scratching our derrières.  So, is the nature of voyeurism definable by intention? Are we comfortable with diCorcia’s work because we believe as an artist he is ultimately benefiting the collective good by challenging what he sees, yet appalled by modern day surveillance because we feel it exists to catch us out?

I for one, will never fly again without suitable undergarments....

---

[1] However, I have to admit puzzlement as to how the couples in question failed to notice the presence of a group of men whose sexual tension was as shaken up as crate load of cheap fizzy white wine recently transported in a land rover across Banbury.

Georgina Sparks

De Gauguin Aux Nabis at Lodeve June 2010

Musee de Lodeve

De Gauguin Aux Nabis

 Le droit de tout oser

Until 14th November 2010 

“It is well to remember that a picture before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote—is essentially a plain surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.”

 Maurice Denis (French, 1870-1943)

An overcast morning with a vague promise of sunshine greeted a superb attendance for the Press opening of the 'Gauguin and the Prophets' exhibition recently opened in Lodeve.

The exhibition, which miraculously in these modern times of continuing and oft convuluted meetings was put together in just 7 months is a journey through the birth of modern art utilising Gauguins' claim 'the right to dare anything' and the Pont Aven and Nabis artists. The timeframe of the collection is the transitional period from the nineteenth and twentieth century.

The exhibition comprises 120 works comprising paintings, sculptures and drawings, some of which have been seldom seen before.

Starting with Gauguin and the School of Pont Aven, the spiritual father of the Nabis, we are led through Gauguin bronzes and paintings by Emile Bernard, Charles Filiger and Mogens Ballin.
 "Just dare release the younger generation, this time breaking with academia and respond to naturalism and realism in photography taught painting schools and workshops where students learn the craft," said the second exhibition curator, Frédéric Bigo. 

The Nabis

The Nabis (The Prophets) were a group of artists who mostly met at the Academie Julienne in Paris. Named after the Hebrew for Prophet (Nabi), it is said they knew they would be creating new forms of expression and were therefore prophets of art. 

There numbers included Paul Serusier, who arrived one day with a painting done on the lid of a cigar box.

This painting was created under guidance from Paul Gauguin and became known as "The Talisman".

Gauguin had encouraged Serusier to use "pure, flat colours and to use decorative logic". The idea was to use emotional interpretation over imitation or recreation. It asked the artist to rely and use memory more, thereby creating a visionary experience from the artist to the viewer instead of a straight forward depiction of a scene or event.

The Nabis initially comprised Serusier, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Henri Ibels and Paul Ranson. Over time, others joined including Edouard Vuillard, Mogens Ballin, Jan Verkade and Kerr Xavier Roussel and this exhibition lets us meet them all.

The exhibition is set out beautifully and explores the two sides to the Nabis.

There is the mystical and spiritual side (Ranson, Denis and others) and there is the more  modern (Bonnard, Roussel etc) who even created set design for the Paris cabaret scene that was beginning to take hold. (Denis was also known as "The Prophet of Montmartre"). There is even the obligatory nod to Toulouse-Lautrec if you look carefully.

From the 1900s, the Nabis group dissolves. But enthuses Gilles Genty, curator and art historian, these artists have been for ten years "incredibly rich" and the origin of a new aesthetic. They open the path to Fauvism and abstract art.

Lodeve has, under the guidance of Gilles Genty, art Historian specialising in the Nabis and Frederic Bigo, Associate Director of Musée Maurice Denis-The Priory brought together for the first time since 1992 an exhibition celebrating the transitional period that led into moadern Art.

The Exhibition

The Exhibition is a path from Gauguins influence to the break up of the Nabis in the 1900's.

The sections are;

Gauguin and the School of Pont-Aven 
Works by Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Charles Filiger, among others, illustrate how the group invented, in the words of Gauguin's "right to dare anything," freeing the color and creating tables that break with the traditional perspective and naturalism photography.

The Nabis (1890-1900) 
The legacy of formal Gauguin and the Pont-Aven (flat colors, Japonisme). 

Maurice Denis's formula defining painting as "a series of tasks in a certain order," became famous from the 1890s and opened the way to abstraction as Fauvism. The view that the Nabis are also on the arts 
Japan suggests their arabesque forms typically Art Nouveau.  

Towards an art of daily life 

The taste for the decorative arts shows a willingness to open up the applied arts and renew the senses at the turn of the century: the desire not to prioritize the arts them to enter the art in everyday life , connecting the artist and the craftsman. It's thinking about art as a unit. 

 
Symbolism, myths, legends 

The Nabis are bold followers of Gauguin's effort to renovate the sacred art. Eschewing the Impressionism which undertakes to abolish the subject in favor of an exaltation of the retinal experience, Gauguin and the Nabis make a painting instead of questioning the sacred, for them, scientism, positivism triumphant Auguste Comte in the late nineteenth century, have failed to explain the world and it is necessary to find the meaning of our existence "at the mysterious center of thought" in the words of Odilon Redon.

Painting and literature, dialogues Crusaders 

Interested early on in the literature (from their adolescence at the Lycée Condorcet) the Nabis then participate in the adventure of the avant-garde theater (scenery Vuillard Sérusier, Denis, linked with directors such as very inventive Lugne-Poe Andre Antoine, ...). Illustrated books on display in the exhibition (Paul Verlaine, Stephane Mallarme, Gide, Alfred Jarry), but also paintings whose subject is the result of literary works. 
This section is specially designed in conjunction with the poetry festival "Voices from the Mediterranean" and give rise to specific events (conferences, tours, workshops). 

Towards a new classicism 

Past 1900, the painting of prophets found a second youth not only in re-visiting the classic painting, but also by reusing technical achievements of Impressionism, while Maurice Denis said its taste for classical art which is find examples in Italy, Vuillard and Bonnard digest in a slow maturation, retinal analysis of Impressionism. The views of famous places (the Colosseum, the Christ Fra Angelico painted by Denis) are in this section, placed next to freer reinterpretations of great classics.  

Approximately 48 of the works shown have been rarely seen or never shown before.

The exhibition has been organized by the Museum of Lodeve in partnership with the Musée Maurice Denis-The Priory of Saint-Germain-en-Laye who have provided approximately 70% of the works on show. 

De Gauguin Aux Nabis - Le droit de tout oser is showing at the Musee de Lodeve until the 14th November 2010

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Lars hansare Book Review

L'Esprit De La Main

Art et Artisanat

Lars Hansare

 

L'Esprit De La Main - Art et Artisanat is the third book that Lars Hansare ha written or collaborated on.

His previous book was an award winning elegant look at one of the worlds most revered culinary delights, the Oyster and once again Lars keeps his subject close to his home and heart.

This book is about looking at what we take for granted.

When we live somewhere we become complacent. We miss the everyday life and its beauty that is there for visitors to see and marvel.

Lars Hansare has a background in photography and film spanning some 40 years and working for such companies as Ikea.

When out in the local villages and towns near to his home he took pictures of a shoemaker.

A chance meeting in Caux took him to the local blacksmith and from here he re-opened his eyes to the sights of the Artists and the Craftsmen and women that surround us in everyday life.

L'Esprit De La Main is a book of memories as well as a documentary of life and craft in rural France.

The book itself is well laid out, starting with a history of Arts and Craft. From here he moves into individual Craftsmen and women, showing a history of their craft before illustrating with superb imagery and occasional watercolours from his wife, the artist Jane Hansare their work, their working practises and where they work.

The author genuinely appears to marvel at the creativity of the individuals and at times the photographs are more powerful than the text and this allows the book to give a visual instruction into the skills honed at times through generations.

The section on Fabrice Lasserre, a cooper (maker of barrels) is a visual display in its own right of a craft that is surviving across borders and time and is informative but also a history lesson. The images take you to medievel times.

Eric Lindgren, a glass blower, gives a section that is so simplistic and easy to aspire to that it is only when you see the image at the end of two beautifully hand crafted glasses created in this ancient craft that you step back and marvel at the skills that have been shared with you.

From potters to blacksmiths, jewellers to milleners and hatters the book has no guidelines, just a wish to show that Arts and Craft is an enchanting and inspiring world.

Reading at 147 pages, the book is well produced, written and published and a good idea is the fact that names and addresses for all the people featured is included for you to visit or contact.

The book is a valuable insight into the locale of Pezenas (although it does go farther afield) and is a wonderful reminder of a visit to the area but is also a history of Arts and Crafts and the care and skill that these individuals share with us.

Lars Hansare lives in Castelnau de Guers with his wife. He is a photographer, film maker and writer

To buy this book please email jl.hansare@orange.fr quoting L.A.

L'Esprit De La Main

ISBN 978-2-917252-32-1 Euro 25.00

Language: French